This just in: Banyan Netfaqs, a media company covering advertising, media and marketing in India, which publishes the website agencyfaqs! and print fortnightly The Brand Reporter has received funding from early stage VC fund Seedfund. Other publications in this domain include exchange4media and Indiantelevision. The amount of funding and stake picked up by Seedfund remains undisclosed, and I don’t think Agencyfaqs is an early stage investment. However, usually the size of Seedfunds investments are around $1-2 million. Agencyfaqs was started by journalist Sreekant Khandekar, the founding editor of A&M magazine, and Sandeep Vij, who is now President of Mudra Communications. I spoke to Khandekar a short while back:

What do you intend to use the funding for?
We’re going to drill deeper into this space, whether by getting into new verticals - We had recently launched a digital section, and an OOH (Out Of Home) section. We will also be looking at new geographies for coverage and events. The opportunity in this is still very large.

Are you also looking at the mobile space?
Not at this point in time.

Was Agencyfaqs struggling for cash? I’d heard around six months ago that you were in the market for funding or an acquisition...
Not at all. We’re very nicely profitable. We turned around a profit about four years ago. But if you want to expand quickly, then you need the money. I’ve known Bharti (Jacob), Mahesh (Murthy) and Pravin for a long time now, and Mahesh’s experience in Advertising will help us.

The pace of growth of the Internet in India is still rather slow. Are you still bullish on this space?
We don’t suffer from the problem that larger b2b sites suffer. Agencyfaqs is viewed from offices. It’s the bigger boys - the kind that want to reach 50 million users that have a problem.