ZopNow's ousted co-founder Bal Krishn Birla joins his previous venture Asklaila

Bal Krishn Birla, the co-founder of online hypermarket ZopNow.com who was ousted from the company in August last year, has joined Asklaila.com, a local search engine which he had co-founded back in 2006, he mentioned in his personal blog.

"(I am) starting another innings at Asklaila. It was fun creating this brand long time back and I still feel that there is a lot more we can do with this. Over the years, we have done a few things good, a few things bad and a few things outright ugly. The idea is to increase the percentage of good things. I can't spell out the entire agenda here, but certainly (I) will be happy to listen to your inputs," read the blog post.

He also mentioned he will look to build a new team at Asklaila. "We can't call ourselves a startup after seven years. So we call ourselves a re-startup." Asklaila was set up by Birla, along with Kiran Konduri and Shriram Adukoorie, and is owned & operated by Bangalore-based Four Interactive Pvt Ltd. The firm is backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Ventures & Saama Capital, and has operations in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

Birla was the CTO of Asklaila between October 2006 and August 2011. He had earlier worked at companies like Amazon, Infosys, Arcot and Potluck Restaurant, and holds a B Tech degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur. When he was ousted from ZopNow, he had alleged that it was indeed a planned move by the other co-founder. Read here for more on that.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)