Kae Capital & Mumbai Angels-backed search engine Squeakee launches beta version

Squeakee.com, a location-based platform exclusively for offers and deals has gone live in beta version today. Squeakee combines deals and offers from online as well as offline retailers across categories like food, clothes, electronics, beauty and health, entertainment and more. Squeakee has also raised under $1 million in seed round from Kae Capital and Mumbai Angels.

Founded by Abrar Shaikh, Squeakee also does hyper-local search currently on for Mumbai region. It is otherwise available in Delhi and Bangalore.

"It is a search engine dedicated to offers and specials. We are a platform that has partnered with retailers to list their offers for the consumers," Shaikh told Techcircle.in.

Squeakee currently charges on a monthly basis from the merchants for listings and has various packages, but is working on more models of revenue for the brands. There is also a 'post your offer' tab for merchants for a one-time listing for free to try out Squeakee. There are of course advertisements as another source of revenue, but Shaikh insists that he likes the homepage to be neat and clean. "We don't encourage usual display ads on our site. Anything innovative is welcome but we like it to be neat for our users," he stated.

Shaikh, who was a part of initial team at Komli heading the business development and more recently GM and head of business for What's-On-India, a TV metadata search company, started building Squeakee earlier this year. The team currently at Squeakee is more than 12 with the core team of senior professionals from Naukri, Rediff, GE Money, JustDial etc. It has already signed up more than 50 online partners and is adding 20-25 offline partners every day, on an average.

A lot of location-based applications have come into play in the recent past. Squeakee, which is positioning itself as a search engine, scores in terms of user interface.

The fact that it is source-agnostic, which means it places offers from all places into one, really works in its favour. It won't really compete with the players in the deal market since they would also be its customer. How much people like it depends on how many offers it can bring to them. From what we know, Indian consumers just love offers. Keep watching the space for more updates.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)