Canaan Partners invests in Bollywood portal, Chakpak.com

Chakpak also plans to get into movie marketing, movie merchandising, and pay per download movie views.

It's a boomtime investment during a slowdown. Bollywood portal Chakpak.com which hopes to make money from advertising and merchandising has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Canaan Partners and the existing seed partner, Accel India, formerly Erasmic Venture Fund.

What prompted Canaan to invest in Chakpak is its market potential. Alok Mittal, Managing Director, Canaan Partners, India explains that out of a base of 40 million online users in India, 18 million are already accessing some or the other entertainment destination. This put together with the demand for Indian content outside India totals to 25 -30 million users. Mittal says "it's a large category. Since chakpak.com gets 5 million visitors every month, they have shown very strong traction over the last 12 months in building a significant presence."

The site claims to get 5 million unique visitors a month which is about 20% of the overall consumption of online entertainment in India and by NRIs.

According to The PricewaterhouseCoopers and FICCI Frames Report, the Indian online media and entertainment market is expected to grow to $36 billion by 2012.

Though Chakpak's services largely revolve around films, they also plan to tap other revenue streams such as movie marketing, movie merchandising, and pay per download movie views. Chakpak will compete with the likes of Bollywood Hungama (formerly IndiaFM), Buzz18, ZoomTV, E24Bollywood and MyPopKorn.

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