Guruji.com – India’s first local internet search engine

Guruji.com – India’s first local internet search engine

Guruji.com, India’s first local internet search engine, launches with $7 million commitment from Sequoia Capital India

Bangalore- October 12, 2006: Guruji.com, backed by Sequoia Capital India, has launched a new local search engine aimed at the Indian web consumer. Guruji.com is focused on providing better search results to Indian consumers, by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context. The company has assembled a farm of servers to index the entire universe of Indian websites and is using propriety algorithms to go deep into the Indian internet domain and fetch locally relevant results to search queries of Indian consumers.

Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, ex-IIT Delhi alumni with significant internet and search experience returned from Silicon Valley to start Guruji.com in early 2006 after Sequoia Capital India provided seed funding to the venture. This is the first and only company in the Indian internet search space to be backed by a leading venture capital firm. Sequoia Capital is a pioneering investor in several leading Internet businesses globally including Google, Yahoo, Paypal and Youtube.

According to a study done by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), there are about 65 million people who use search engines in India and the current size of market for search engine advertising is $50 million. This market is expected to grow significantly over the next five years.

Anurag Dod, Co-Founder & CEO, Guruji.com said “What sets us apart is our focus on the Indian market and the Indian consumer. When an Indian consumer types in a search key word like “newspaper” the results should show him websites of the top Indian newspapers rather than other news sites which are not relevant to him. We have worked very hard to build the best local search product in the market.” he added.

Gaurav Mishra, Co-Founder & COO, Guruji.com explains “90% of internet search queries are local in nature, and Guruji.com will deliver better search results than any other search engine in these instances. For example if a user types a search “Pizza in Koramangala, Bangalore “ or “Chinese restaurant Juhu, Mumbai” the user will be able to see local business listings as well as articles, reviews, blogs, or any other web references.”

Sumir Chadha, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India, adds “We are excited to have partnered with Guruji.com as it pushes the envelope on providing better search for Indian internet users. Their internet search engine is the best in the market.”

About Guruji.com

Guruji.com is India’s first internet search engine. Founded by two IIT Delhi graduates, the company focuses on developing search products for enhancing the Indian user experience. Crawl Technology, used by guruji.com, is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms. The technology is built on a distributed architecture that can scale with the growing needs of the users. It crawls the web, indexes the data that it gathers and provides the user with a simple keyword based interface to get to the data quickly and efficiently. Guruji.com aims to have the most comprehensive search for Indian content on the web. To learn more about Guruji.com visit www.guruji.com.

About Sequoia Capital India

Sequoia Capital India provides venture and growth equity capital to entrepreneurs who wish to build world-class companies. Sequoia Capital India manages three funds totaling $750mm focused on investments in India across sectors. Sequoia Capital India investments include Applabs, Bharti Telesoft, Café Coffee Day, GlobalLogic, Indiatimes, Travelguru and Shaadi. Globally, Sequoia Capital has been an early investor in such companies as Google, Yahoo, Apple, Oracle, Cisco and Youtube. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com .

For more information, please contact:

Hareeni Shree / Sonali P.S
hareeni {at} mutualpr(.)com / sonali {at} mutualpr(.)com
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