Canaan Partners Leads techTribe’s First Venture Investment Round

Company News

New Delhi, July 25

Canaan Partners, a major international venture capital firm, today announced that it has led the first round of institutional funding in techTribe, India’s Career Networking portal. The investment will be used to expand techTribe’s sales and marketing infrastructure in India and to drive revenue growth. Under this partnership, Alok Mittal, Canaan's Managing Director in India, will be named to the techTribe board of directors.

techTribe has established itself as the premier career networking site in India, and has recently pioneered a referral recruiting model to complement its large community of professionals in India. techTribe’s focus on recruiting for middle to senior level positions is estimated to be a US$400 million market in India, and is ideally served by a network based referral model it pioneered.

In India, over 5 million job seekers leverage the internet for their job searches each month, and techTribe’s referral model is ideally designed for the 2 million experienced candidates, who are not served by the current portals.

"Since the launch of techTribe’s peer referral model for recruiting last month, we have seen 500,000 new invitations sent out by our members, clearly demonstrating the community’s acceptance of the innovative model," commented techTribe CEO Rohit Agarwal. "Canaan Partners and Alok Mittal, with their experience in the recruiting industry, make ideal partners for techTribe at this stage to help us scale and lead the $400 million industry," he added.

Commenting on the investment, Alok Mittal, Managing Director of Canaan Partners in India, said, "techTribe’s community based referral recruiting model is a great example of innovation in the Web 2.0 space. The company has identified a large, untapped market, and has an experienced team who have executed well since inception. We're confident that this investment round will allow techTribe to prove the referral model and set itself up for explosive growth."

This latest investment in techTribe also represents the first venture investment in the Indian recruiting-space in the last five years and further highlights Canaan's ongoing commitment to early-stage technology deals in India. Canaan has previously invested in BharatMatrimony, the largest online matrimonial service in India, and iYogi, a direct-to-consumer desktop support service.

For competitive reasons, Canaan Partners and techTribe did not disclose the terms of the investment.

For further information, please contact:

Amita Tandan

Account Director

Text 100 Public Relations

E-mail: amitat@text100.co.in