MUMBAI: Indian entrepreneurs are harvesting the Internet boom, selling their ventures to major players. The latest to cash in are Rashmi Sinha and her brother Amit Ranjan.
The professional networking site LinkedIn has agreed to acquire SlideShare, a leading professional content sharing community, for approximately $118.75 million, or Rs 6.40 billion.
The brainchild of the website and co-founder was Sinha‘s husband Jonathan Boutelle who is based in the San Francisco. Sinha, a PhD in cognitive cognitive neuropsychology from Brown University in the US, is the CEO of SlideShare. Ranjan, an alumnus of Delhi‘s Faculty of Management Studies, is in charge of the India office.
The transaction will be carried out in 45 per cent cash and 55 per cent stock deal. The company said that the acquisition is expected to close during the second quarter of 2012.
Founded in October 2006, SlideShare helps professionals discover people through content, and content through people. SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors.
SlideShare is also enabling the sharing of presentations across the Web; nearly 7.4 million presentations hosted by SlideShare are embedded across more than 1.4 million unique domains.
"Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity," said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. "These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members. We’re very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn."
SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha commented, "We built SlideShare to help professionals share presentations and connect people through content. What we can build with LinkedIn, the largest professional network on the Internet, is the most natural extension of this vision. I am excited about what we can build together."
There is a rich list of Indian entrepreneurs who made millions of dollars by selling their firms to dotcom giants. Recently, Facebook acquired Indian entrepreneur Abheek Anand‘s start-up Tagtile, in a cash and stock deal. Last year, Walmart bought Kosmix, a data analytics company floated by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, for around $300 million. In the past, they had sold comparison-shopping site Junglee to Amazon for $250 million. And let‘s not forget Sabeer Bhatia, the man who started it all. His free Web-based email service Hotmail was snapped up by Microsoft Corp.
