Deals listing startup Squeakee includes maps feature on its platform
At a press briefing held yesterday in Mumbai, deals serving website Squeakee announced inclusion of maps feature on its platform.
Founded in 2012, Squeakee is a hyper-local search engine that uses the customers’ location to serve information on deals and discounts on products and services in the location that the customer is accessing the site from. The site provides information across categories like food & beverage, electronics, apparel & accessories and beauty & health among others.
Founder Abrar Shaikh also hinted at unveiling new features and apps targeted at merchants and customers in the next few months. “We have a strong tech team that is working on building new features for Squeakee. It is being tested before we can announce the launch formerly,” he said.Since starting up, Squeakee has raised two rounds of funding from Mumbai Angels and Kae Captial. Sasha Mirchandani, founder MD, Kae Capital, who was also present at the press briefing, said it was the idea of location-based search and the passion of the entrepreneur that attracted them to Squeakee. “Amar (Goel of Komli Media) called to tell me about Squeakee. And in the VC community, referral calls are the best way to get a VC interested,” revealed Sasha.
Squeakee is Kae Capital's second bet on location-based services. They were first interested in the space when InMobi was mKhoj and were trying to solve the problem of local information search. “The market back then was very nascent for a location-based service, but now we think Squeakee is in a good position to reap the benefits of change in technology and customer usage habits,” explained Sasha.
Abrar claims that Squeakee has 10,000 merchants registered on its platform, of which 40% are brands. The startup has gone deep with its listing and partnerships in Mumbai, and has plans to expand to Delhi and Bangalore in the future.
Besides launch of new services, Abrar and Sasha also spoke about raising the third round of institutional funding for the startup by mid-2014. At present the map integrated version of Squeakee's website can only be accessed through a PC, their mobile interface still shows only a plain listing of the deals.
YourStory has written about startups like ApneAreaMein that are also using hyper-local as differentiators for its service. The best known name in this space from India is Zomato, which continues to expand aggressively.