Glad to announce that iYogi 
has raised their Series B investment of $9.5M led by SAP ventures, with follow-on investments from Canaan Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. You might remember the $3.1M Series A investment last April – the company has progressed very well since then. What is really encouraging is that iYogi, along with companies in online tutoring space, has proven out the viability of taking offshore services down to individual consumers (also called personal offshoring now in buzz!) That opens up a whole slew of opportunities for technology-rich services companies.
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Samir, Blame it on the talent crunch – this time hitting the VC and PE players big time. These companies have people who are at best mere ‘post men’, and at worst ‘Dan Altobellos’ of India. It doesn’t matter if your idea has potential or not, so long as you can convince these poor ‘fish out of water’ kinds. I would love to hear about the ROIs from these funds in the years to come 🙂
the IYogi story would be incomplete without a preview of its founders & team. U gotta meet those guys and ull be convinced that this is gonna be the story of one of Indias biggest BPO’S in the making , in terms of growth its definately one of the fastest
Uday Challu is one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs you would come across and most of all a great guy too – recently a bigwig at IBM who is planning his own outsourcing setup met with Uday who promptly said he could observe & learn at IQR, nos strings attached. Now where in the world do u find sucessful entrepreneurs making gestures like this. This is one instance that speaks a lot about the team behind the glory
Just went through their website. As a consumer I can only comment on the consumer plan. Some thoughts and questions
> Dell, HP and other brands offer very good service under warranty these days. They all have integrated chat applications where you can talk to a tech support engineer (most likely in India) who can try and resolve your issues. This is for free for 1 – 2 years. Additional warranties can be purchased from the manufacturer or from the store (bestbuy,circuitcity) for A onetime $120 payment for a year is not a small amount. There is still a lot of reservations(misguided I must add) about dealing with offshore Indian csrs. Communication is still perceived to be a barrier. Paying 120 bucks with these obstacles might be .
> How about a more transaction oriented payment plan. A flat fee to investigate the problem and then a rate plan for fixing specific problems. The higher the consumer pain the higher the price that can be charged ;).
> imho Data backup is also a huge market opportunity. Just a separate plan for servicing data backup plans could also be higher margin (server space cost is the same everywhere I agree, but the personalized touch of having someone to call when you’ve lost all your data is a big bonus for an indian based outfit)
> With the baby boomer generation, who are less savvy with computers there might be some avenues for tailoring services to their needs. (Printing and mailing pictures from photo websites….
Help with email and other online tools)
Overall impressed with the site layout and good luck iYogi!!
Really, it saddens me to see more cost/labour arbitrage type businesses being funded, and not any India-market centric opportunities funded.
Doesnt anybody see, for instance, a huge market in stopping terrorism in India? Agreed it is all govt. business, but it could be huge!
regards,
Samir
Congratulations to iYogi. Love their business model !
As time passes, their acquired knowledge base is only going to grow – resulting in better and better responses to mom and dad support issues.
Good luck to all.