Excl: Helion & Accel invest around Rs 2 Cr in Hyderabad-based MySmartPrice

MySmartPrice Web Technology Pvt Ltd, a Hyderabad-based startup that operates a price comparison site called Mysmartprice.com, has received close to Rs 2 crore in venture capital funding from Helion Venture Partners and Accel Partners. While Helion Venture Fund II, a fund managed by Helion Advisors Pvt Ltd, invested Rs 1 crore in the startup late last year, Accel India Venture Fund II, a fund managed by Accel India Management Co Pvt Ltd, invested around the same amount in May, this year.

Helion and Accel did not reply to e-mailed queries at the time of publishing this story. Sitakanta Ray, co-founder, MySmartPrice, could not be reached.

The startup was co-founded by Ray and Sulakshan Kumar as a part time project in September 2010. Initially, it was started as a book price comparison service. However, the founders later left their jobs and started working on it fulltime from October 2010. The current version of the site was launched in December the same year. Prior to MySmartPrice, Ray, an MBA from IIM Bangalore, has worked in Oracle and ICICI. Kumar was working in Oracle and Infosys prior to starting MySmartPrice. The startup is based in Hyderabad and currently the team size is six.

The site basically searches the best price of products from the major online stores in India. The company claims that the prices on the site are updated every 24 hours. The stores available as of now include Infibeam, Saholic, Yebhi, Indiaplaza and eBay, among others. The various categories that the site offers price comparison in include mobiles, books, cameras, laptops, electronics, games and health and personal care. There are also smart filters for all categories (other than mobiles) that can be used to facilitate better selection.

Apart from price comparison, the site also provides coupons of leading online stores in a separate coupons section. As of now, the site gets around 60,000 visitors a day and the company claims that all the traffic is organic, since it has not spent a single rupee on advertising.

The site competes with a number of websites that offer price comparison which include niche players like Thisyathat.com and IndiaBookStore.net (for books) and PhoneCurry.com (for mobile phones) and iShopper.com among others. But the biggest and the most prominent rival is Amazon's (the world's largest online retailer) Junglee.com, an online shopping service that enables customers to find and discover products from online and offline retailers in India and also from the parent site Amazon.com.