Webaroo Technology has raised a $10 million round of funding for their product SMSGupShup, an SMS-based community site in India, according to Pluggd.in. The round, the third for the company, was co-led by Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures.
SMSGupShup is a community site that enables users to join groups according to their interests and receive updates through their mobile phones via SMS. Very similar to Twitter, in that you can send and receive mobile updates to your friends, family and other group members (without the downtime). SMSGupShup has over 7 million subscribers and 300,000 publishers. They see a much lower proportion of web visitors as mobile phones in India outnumber computers almost 7 to 1.
While Twitter is mostly used for casual communications and notifications, SMSGupShup is used for services that are critical to a lot people. For example, fishermen can receive tide and weather information, and people can pass along emergency information to locals who don’t have televisions or computers. The site has seen a huge rise in growth, with the SMSGupShup community having grown from 1 million subscribers in January to the current 7 million.
Webaroo, originally launched as a service that allowed users to see cached web content when they are offline. Founders Rakesh Mathur (founder of Armedia, Junglee, Stratify) and Beerud Sheth (founder of Elance) presented their startup in July 2006 at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference. Two years later, they have changed their approach, focusing on their core offering, SMSGupShup. Webaroo also offers their original product Webaroo for Notebooks, a mobile client, a search utility called Search Radar, and a Wikipedia browsing tool called WikiSlice.
Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures join previous investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners ($1.5 million Series A), and Cambrian Ventures, Lloyd George Asian Plus Fund, and HTSG ($10 million Series B), bringing their total funding to $21.5 million.
Update: We’ve tracked down a source that says this is a premature announcement, and that the funding hasn’t closed yet.
Does Gup Shup mean something in indian? Or is this just a particularly hilarious Web2.0 product name?
It means chatting in hindi which is the nationla language of India
Fine, I mean “in any language spoken in India.” Silly!
@greg
gup shup means chit chat it is mostly used in colloquial Hindi (National language of India)
and the junglee crowd knows its stuff — Ashish (helion founding partner) was a founder, and Anand (who posted on this phenom) is also! They are also godlike dudes with brains to spare.
Isn’t that logo the international symbol for Circle Jerk?
Completely unrelated but that logo of Webaroo is pretty neat!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
Calley – you are going to make a great Techcrunch employee – you’ve managed to not link to the company once, but plenty of times to Crunchbase – Mike will love that. Bonus points for linking to Venturebeat. Nicely done.
How much does it cost to send SMS from web to cell phone.
Is it free or does the carrier charge a bulk SMS fee.
Anybody has any idea about the cost?
Its about 3 Rupees per sms, charged by the carrier. http://www.mouthshut.com has a similar service, focused on reviews.
Nice..looks cool. I wonder if they will have it available in the USA?
From an offline web-cache/search engine to a Twitter clone !! Quite a change in “focus”
Any body figure a connection between the two ? 
That is the sad part of venture capital. People who have been successful in the past will still end up raising money, no matter how pathetic the ideas may be or how the company changes focus as in this case…..I wont be surprised to see yet another random application being spun off from this company, and ahh the VCs would always be there to invest…..
ads with sms’s? no thanks gupshup
Any such service in any other country??
3 rupees per bulk sms equals aproximately 5 euro cent (current price for european carriers 6 to 7 cents). does anybody have an idea how much they make with the advertisement per sms?
Webaroo to be the official SMS for Bonnaroo?
It’s not 3 Rs .. checkout
http://www.medi...ion-in-funding/
for details on cost per SMS etc
its pretty neat…
any one who loves gupshup must try indyarocks also.Pretty neat and useful
#12 explains exactly why Twitter will be a total bomb.
#14 – its not rs 3 per SMS. its rs .05-.07.
but thats $6.57 million on sms only every year accroding to http://www.medi...ion-in-funding/
Charles River and Helion get ready to loose your shirt on this investment. Lot of companies have tried this before and there’s not enough money to be made. Just my personal $0.002
in reply to #12:
I have my blog on gupshup, Ads are piggybacked on the posted sms only if content length of sms <= 140 characters.
Make sense, doesn’t it ?
I heard they are gonna internationalized it now.
So its still not clear whether they have been funded or not. There are other newer services in India which are similar and faster. One of them is http://www.tagg.in
Hey HelionVC has denied making the investment check this -> http://www.watb...t-on-the-issue/
Sweet I love getting text messages, I’ll be getting this service asap.
veery gooooooooooooooood……..
let this service be provided in punjabi language.