Some interesting facts were released by Directi, in an interview Bhavin Turakhia CEO with TechCircle.in.
“What is Directi’s current valuation?”
“We haven’t done a recent valuation exercise, but we currently quote that the group as a whole is valued around $350 million.”
What has been your Y-o-Y growth rate? Name the top three businesses of Directi in terms of revenue generation?
“Directi as a whole has always seen a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in upwards of 30 per cent.”
“Some of the newer businesses are growing around 70-80 per cent on a Y-o-Y basis, while the established ones are growing around 25 per cent.”
“Our top three businesses would be ResellerClub, Skenzo and Media.net.”
How many domain names have you sold via BigRock? Also, can you share some numbers for the contextual advertising business?
As of now, we are selling around 25,000-30,000 domain names via BigRock on a monthly basis. And if you look at Directi as a whole, we have around 6.5 million domain names that we power. As far as the contextual advertising business is concerned, we serve close to 24 billion ad impressions every year and have served over 19 million websites till now.
Talking about Talk.to, don’t you think the real-time communication space is already over-crowded?
While there are a number of clients catering to different requirements, there isn’t a single platform that covers everything (SMS, IM, as well as Facebook and Google Talk, etc.). And it doesn’t matter how many messaging solutions exist out there. If users find value in a product offering, they will definitely use it.
Have you raised any funding? Talk about your fund-raising plans?
Although Directi has largely been an investment free and self-funded organisation, in 2008, we had received PE investment from the UK-based investment firm Ashmore Group for one of our business units (Skenzo).
Also, ICANN has approved the creation of generic top-level domains (in a process to expand the Internet naming system) and Radix has applied for a number of them. There is going to be an auction for those top-level domains sometime next year, and while we have our own reserves to participate in the auction, we may add to our reserves by raising additional funds. We haven’t decided on the exact amount, but it will lie in the $50-100 million range.
What is your team size? Also tell us about your presence?
We are close to about a 1,000 people now.
In India we have offices in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi and abroad we have offices in the US (Austin), China and UAE. And we are also setting up offices in New York, San Francisco, UK and Germany that should be set up in the next year and a half.
