Shaadi To Tie Up Second Round Funding With Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs is believed to have invested $12-13 million in People Interactive Group, the owners of matrimonial portal Shaadi.com, social networking website Fropper and the recently launched property portal Makaan.com. This will be the second round of investment in People Interactive, which raised $8 million in first round from Sequoia Capital India in early 2006. Mauj, the mobile content company of People Group, is not part of this deal. Mauj also had received $10 million from Sequoia Capital India (erstwhile WestBridge Capital Partners) in early 2006. But mobile content businesses are not anymore the favourites of VCs since they are still squeezed in by the operators in revenue share.Sources told VC Circle that the deal was closed last week. When contacted, People Interactive spokesperson,termed the development as “speculative”, and declined to comment further. “The second round of investments in People Interactive by Goldman Sachs is just a speculation and we wouldn’t like to comment on this,” the spokesperson said in a mail to VC Circle. People Interactive was co-founded in 1997 by Anupam Mittal. Its flagship business is Shaadi.com, which along with BharatMatrimony, leads the Indian online matrimonial classifieds market. The others in the business include Jeevansathi.com of Info Edge and SimplyMarry.com of the Times Internet Ltd. The People Group is aiming to go in for an IPO in 2009, and probably a Nasdaq listing.Interestingly, this is the first new media deal for Goldman Sachs, which has recently upped its proprietary private equity business in India. It recently co-invested (along with GE Power) $60 million in Sudhir Gensets, $24 million in Tejas Networks, $15 million in Ludhiana-based Cremica Foods, $17 million in JK Paper and an undisclosed amount in mobile value added services company OnMobile.