We are profitable and looking for fresh funding: Mydala.com co-founders

Mydala, run by Delhi-based Kinobeo Software Pvt Ltd, is one of the heavily funded coupons and deals sites in India. The company has bagged Rs 28 crore of funding to date, of which Rs 27 crore came from Info Edge India Ltd, owner of Naukri.com and 99acres.com.

Founded in 2009 by Anisha Singh (CEO), Arjun Basu (director) and Ashish Bhatnagar (CTO), the company claims it sees over 300 per cent growth in annual revenues. With more than 200 people on board, Mydala is now looking to go hyper-local in each city it is present in.

Techcircle.in met with Singh and Basu to know more about the company's growth, future plans, funding and more. Here are edited excerpts:

In an interaction with Techcircle in November 2012, you had said that you were looking to achieve profitability in the past fiscal. Have you reached the goal?

Singh: Yes; we are a profitable business now. We were well on schedule and turned profitable on a profit after tax (PAT) basis in the mid of last financial year (FY2013-14).

As of November 2012, you were doing around 80,000 vouchers per day. Has this number increased? Which are the top three categories?

Singh: We are doing around 120,000 coupons daily. We will announce more partnerships in coming months. So this number will also grow phenomenally, at least 75 per cent more.

Health & beauty continue to be the two dominating categories. We also have actively started pushing e-commerce deals. We are doing both offline and online retail and are seeing phenomenal growth in both segments.

How many merchants have you partnered with so far?

Basu: Our merchant base is more than 120,000, most of who are offline retailers. Going forward, our key target vertical will continue to be offline retail.

Singh: We work with all large brands and small businesses which have very limited platforms to market themselves. If you look outside Tier I cities, we are the only company that operates in small cities and towns. Local and location-based deals have made us popular.

What is your mobile strategy? What per cent of your page traffic and revenue come from mobile?

Singh: We have been aggressively focusing on mobile over the past two years. While mobile is still secondary to many of our competitions, it has been the largest revenues and page traffic driver for us. We have exclusive partnerships with all telecom partners and OEMs in the country. We are also providing operator-billing solutions for our users.

Basu: Around 60 per cent of our revenues and 70 per cent of the total visitor base come through mobile.

What are your expansion plans?

Singh: Everybody is focusing on eight-nine cities in India, but there is a much larger world out there. We are expanding to more cities. Additionally, we will go more hyper local in all the cities are we are operating.

When we started, Tier II and Tier III cities were not a key focus for us. And now we realise the power of mobile, and we see around 40-45 per cent of our traffic coming from these cities. A lot of active buying is happening in these cities.

We had also considered going international a few months ago, since we had received a lot of interests from global mobile service providers. However, we are not looking at it now and have kept the plans under wraps for some more time, as we feel that we have enough opportunity in India itself.

We are looking to open offices in Bangalore and Mumbai within a few months.

What are current trends in online coupon industry in India? Where is the industry heading for?

Singh: The future of coupon is bright. There was bad publicity around coupons; coupon giant Groupon recently saw some highs and lows. However, successful IPOs have happened in the US market just around coupons. Similarly, we see India growing fast in terms of coupons and vouchers.

Can you share revenues figures? What is your target for next fiscal?

Basu: We cannot disclose revenue figures. We have been seeing more than 300 per cent growth year over year. We hope to continue this growth in the next fiscal as well.

You raised Rs 28 crore from investors including Info Edge, to date. Where did you deploy the capital? Are you planning to raise a fresh round of funding soon?

Singh: We used the money to enhance our technology, expand business and also for marketing. We are looking for more funding. Like what Basu has said, we have set a base and all drivers are in place. Now we need to grow rapidly.

Basu: Since we are already profitable, we are very selective about the investors we will be partnering with. This time around, we will not dilute much stake in the firm.

Our focus is to go deeper in the cities we are present in, as location-based deals are very important to us. We are already providing a self-serving platform to merchants and will be adding more features in coming months. Also, we are sitting on a lot of data that we crunch on a daily basis, and a lot of focus will be to enhance this data base.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)