Rahul Yadav: it’s controversial
Housing.com’s former CEO Rahul Yadav quit his job in a way similar to quitting cigarettes. ‘Is he there, is he not there’ was the question on the minds of anyone closely watching the Indian startup space and everyone who was tracking the CEO’s shenanigans.
After a public spat with Sequoia, Yadav was sacked. According to a Times of India report, Yadavis now building a new company, Intelligent Interfaces, with backing from the Flipkart founders.
Acquisitions and mergers
Snapdeal’s acquisition of FreeCharge, at a reported valuation of roughly Rs. 2,681 crores in April this year, was one of the largest buyouts in the history of the Indian consumer Internet sector. Although Snapdeal managed to arm itself with ammunition to battle rivals like Flipkart, the latter was ahead in grabbing media spotlight.
On the other side, Quikr finalised a deal to acquire CommonFloor.com for $200 million. Likewise, Ola acquired TaxiForSure in a $200-million deal.
Debut of Alibaba
In February 2015, Chinese e-commerce player Alibaba and its Founder Jack Ma made their first investment in India, in Paytm. Similarly, Shenzhen-based Tencent invested in healthcare start-up Practo.
The rise of budget-hotel aggregators
Budget-hotel aggregators were the biggest newsmakers in 2015, with some mind boggling investments, rapid expansion and quirky campaigns. Players such as OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms zoomed past online travel agency veterans Make My Trip and Yatra.com in terms of both tapping the burgeoning travel market and staying firmly in the news.
The food-tech segment became crowded
In 2015, the food-tech segment got heated up with the increase in the number of players, including Swiggy, Foodpanda and InnerChef. Bad news travels faster than the speed of light. A lot of things managed to spoil the party for TinyOwl and Zomato in 2015. While TinyOwl Co-Founder Gaurav Choudhary spent two days held hostage inside the company’s Pune office by angry employees who were laid off earlier, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal’s angry e-mail to his sales team, asking them to pull up their socks, got leaked to the media.
The trend of shopping grocery online
The online grocery became the most sought-after segment with Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, Paytm venturing into grocery delivery.
In the highly competitive hyper local delivery and services sector, Big Basket, Grofers and Peppertap took daily grocery shopping online and made everything available at a click. While both disruptors received massive funding from Sequoia, Grofers pipped Peppertap to win the coverage race.
