SureWaves bags Rs 35-crore deal to hire talent, innovate

BANGALORE: Canaan Partners, a multi-billion dollar global venture capital firm, has led a Rs 35-crore investment into Bangalore-based digital media technology company SureWaves MediaTech. Existing investors, India Innovation Fund and Accel Partners, also participated in the round.

SureWaves which provides advertising technology to customers such as food company Nestle, healthcare products maker Johnson & Johnson and consumer goods company Hindustan Unilever will use the funds to hire talent, tap global markets and support innovation.

“We will be targeting several emerging and developed countries,” said SureWaves MD Rajendra Khare, who believes their technology is first of its kind, as even in developed markets like United States, an automated centralised solution for insertion and real-time monitoring of ads across multiple television channels is not available.


“First our focus will be to consolidate our position and offering in the India market,” said Khare. The firm raised .`10 crore in its first round of funding from India Innovation Fund and Accel in 2011.

Founded in2006 by former Wipro colleagues Rajendra Khare, Anant Kansal and Tapan Datta, SureWaves has developed a technology that enables large-scale aggregation of audiences across multiple television channels. It then offers a single window interface to large national advertisers to effectively reach out to mass audiences on a market by market basis.

“We call it SureWaves media grid. It is similar to how a power grid works,” said Khare, an alumnus of BITS, Pilani, who cofounded semi-conductor start-up Armedia Labs which was acquired by Broadcom Corporation for $67 million. Khare said their “media grid” is one of the largest connected television networks of its kind anywhere in the world which spans across 28 states across the country through partnerships with over 280 cable TV channels. It reaches over 80 million households and 400 million viewers.

The company positions a propriety device which is connected to the grid and the TV channels.