Mergers & Acquisitions | 8 May 2014
Hopscotch Acquires Blume Ventures Backed SkoolShop
by Tilak Devadiga
 
@Tilak
Online baby products store, Hopscotch has acquired school supplies e-tailer SkoolShop, in a stock and cash deal. The deal would see angel investors like Google's Rajan Anandan and former Microsoft regional director Jaspreet Bindra cashing out while Blume will continue to remain a shareholder of the combined entity. The acquisition would  help expand Hopscotch increase its customer base and also give it a larger vendor base. SkoolShop,  an ecommerce site run by @Occasion Pvt. Ltd., was founded by Harvard Alumnis  Satya Raghavan and Anusha Mahalingam in 2011. The company sells  education and school related products including products such as course books, school bags, digital educational content, school apparels, art supply, among others. It had alliances with cartoon network, Fastrack, HCL MyEdu Tab, etc to get their products on board. In 2012, it had raised Series A round from @Blume and angel investors including Sunil Kalra, Srikant Shastri, Vikas Choudhary and Puneet Deora. Raghavan is leaving to further his entrepreneurial interests, while Mahalingam will join the Hopscotch leadership to help lead the business development function. As per reports the firm estimates to earn revenue of  R25 Cr in FY15. Hopscotch had recently raised an undisclosed amount from Nisa Godrej, LionRock Capital, Skype co-founder Toivo Annus and Diapers CTO Wei Yan to boost its marketing efforts and to improve its technology platform. It had earlier in 2012, raised seed investment from unknown investors. Founded by two former Diapers.com executives, Rahul Anand and Lisa Kennedy in 2012, Hopscotch is a boutique e-commerce startup which sells products for infants and kids. Headquartered in Mumbai with an office in New York, it offers product from a current list of 400-odd niche international and domestic brands. 0p. CRISIL Research Article Online Retail - Feb14
by   @Crisil_Research
A Crisil Research report estimates that online retailing will become a R50,000 Cr industry by 2016. According to Crisil, the segment has been growing like gangbusters in India, with revenues surging from around Rs 1,500 crore in 2007-08 to an estimated R13,900 Cr in 2012-13 – or a CAGR of 56% . Yet it remains a nascent portion of the overall e-commerce segment in India where the travel business dominates with about two-thirds share. But the equation is changing fast enough to pose a threat to brick-and-mortar retailers - not just of books, music and electronics, but also apparel and grocery. Recently online book store BookAdda.com had disclosed the acquisition of KoolSkool, online retailer providing a one-stop-shop for school going children.

Hopscotch Acquires Blume Ventures Backed SkoolShop

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Hit the Mark Inc, which runs Mumbai-based curated baby and kids products flash sales venture Hopscotch, has acquired Occasion Kommerce Pvt Ltd run online school supplies retailer, SkoolShop, according to a report inÂ  The Economic Times Â citing Hopscotchâs co-founder Rahul Anand. SkoolShop’s site will redirect customers to Hopscotch for a few days before the portal is shut down. Anand declined to share specifics of the transaction but estimates that his firm will earn revenue of Rs 25 crore in FY15. SkoolShop’s investors Blume Ventures and angel investors like Rajan Anandan will exit the company as a result of this deal. âWe found a lot of synergies between the two companies. The acquisition will help expand our customer base rapidly and also give us a larger vendor base,â Anand said. “Our consumers are the same and it makes sense to offer them the ability to find the best possible products for education and beyond all at one place,” added Satya Raghavan, cofounder of Skoolshop. Hopscotch is an online store for baby and kidsâ brands, including apparel, shoes, toys & books, and moms & maternity products. The firm claims that unlike traditional online stores, it introduces new limited-time boutiques every day. Hopscotch also offers a feature called pre-order, which allows users to book select products ahead of time. About four months ago, Hopscotch had secured $2 million (about Rs12 crore) from Singapore-based LionRock Capital, with participation from a group individuals including Nisaba Godrej of Godrej Group, Skype co-founder Toivo Annus and Diapers.com CTO Wei Yan. On the other hand, SkoolShop.com was founded by Satya Raghavan, Sumant Kasliwal and Anthony Thottungal in October 2011. Apart from retailing products on its site, SkoolShop also supplies text books, stationery and other products directly to schools. The company had raised an undisclosed amount in seed round funding from Blume Ventures and angel investors including Sunil Kalra, Srikant Shastri, Vikas Choudhary and Puneet Deora. Casualties in the space
The online retail industry dedicated to kidsâ products has seen a lot of consolidation in the recent past. AllSchool-Stuff shut shop last month. Online book store BookAdda acquired school-focused book portal KoolSkool. Kalaari Capital-backed Hushbabies shut down and Hoopos merged with Babyoye. In a similar case, online toystore Wopshop shut down. Another babycare focused etailer Hushbabies (Kalaari Capital backed) was also shut down by investors. Hopscotch competes with two significant VC-backed ventures in the verticalâFirstCry and Babyoye.

LionRock-backed baby & kids products e-tailer Hopscotch acquires SkoolShop

Mumbai-based online baby and kids products store Hopscotch is announcing that it is acquiring of SkoolShop.com, an online store that specializes in school supplies. Hopscotch had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SkoolShop, which is owned by Mumbai based Occasion Kommerce. The financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed. The acquisition creates an exit for early stage venture capital investor Blume Ventures and a group of angel investors, including Microsoft’s Jaspreet Bindra and Google India managing director Rajan Anandan. “The synergies between the two companies are very high with both targeting a similar consumer base. It’s great to see an asset that a founder created finding value and validation in the space,” Blume Ventures’ Ashish Fafadia said on the exit. SkoolShop, founded in late 2011 by Sumant Kasliwal, Satya Raghavan and Anthony Thottungal, raised an undisclosed amount in an angel round from Bindra and Anandan the same year. Early last year, it raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round led by
Blume Ventures. A new set of angels — Sunil Kalra, Srikant Shastri, Vikas Choudhary, Puneet Deora — participated in the round. “Satya (Satya Raghavan) and I were classmates at Harvard Business School. We’re excited by the size and scope of opportunity that the acquisition presents. Hopscotch and Skoolshop were founded to help Indian parent’s access great assortment for their children. We believe bringing our businesses together will help unlock value for both sides,” Hopscotch co-founder Rahul Anand said in a statement. The acquisition will see a part of the SkoolShop team moving to Hopscotch. Co-founder AnushaMahalingam, also a Harvard Business School alumnus, will join the Hopscotch leadership to help lead business development. Hopscotch, founded in 2011 by Anand and Lisa Kennedy, both earlier with Diapers.com, raised $2 million in February from Singapore-based family office LionRock Capital, Skype co-founder Toivo Annus, Diapers.com co-founder Wei Yan and industrialist Adi Godrej’s younger daughter Nisa Godrej. The online store offers consumers a curated selection of merchandise through daily flash sales. Boutiques go live every morning at 9.30 AM and last for a limited time. The selections are hand-picked by in-house buyers. Recent activity in the kids and baby products estore market
There’s already been some consolidation in the online school supplies market. Earlier, Delhi based BookAdda acquired KoolSkool , an online store owned by Bangalore company Antariksh Retail, which sells learning and school material for children. Last month, Gurgaon based AllSchoolStuff shuttered operations after it was reportedly unable to raise follow-on funding. In the kids and baby products category, Hopscotch competes with players such as Firstcry and BabyOye. Images credit: Hopscotch, SkoolShop

Hopscotch buys school supplies estore SkoolShop. Blume Ventures, angels exit

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Can Music Streaming Startup Bloom.fm Avoid The Deadpool? There are lots of systems clamouring to help educate the next generation of coders. One of them, New York-based startup Hopscotch , closed a $1.2 million seed funding round last August which it’s just announcing today, in conjunction with the release of v2.0 of its app. The seed funding came from Resolute Ventures , Collaborative Fund , Kapor Capital and other unnamed investors, and was used to expand the team, launch the community and build version 2 of the app, says co-founder Jocelyn Leavitt. Hopscotch’s special sauce is to be mobile device focused. Its graphical programming language has been specifically designed for use on the iPad. Indeed, it calls itself an “iPad programming language”, and focuses on making coding easier via graphical elements that kids can drag and drop to build up programs. So basically like  Scratch  – but for iPads. “Hopscotch works by dragging and dropping colorful blocks of code to build routines,” explains Leavitt. “These routines can then be saved and attached to different objects and activated by different events on the iPad (such as “when the iPad is shaken” or “when the iPad hears a loud noise”). So you could, for instance, program a bear to do a somersault every time you clapped your hands. “Hopscotch is an object oriented programming language, but it is visual. With a visual programming language, a beginner doesn’t get tripped up syntax or typos the way they typically might with a typed programming language (like Ruby or Javascript).”
After a year on the app store, Hopscotch said its app has been used to create more than 1.5 million projects, compiling more than 57 million blocks of code. The startup itself was founded in 2011, and has been used by teachers and kids in more than 100 countries thus far. It’s not disclosing user numbers at this point. The new version of the app combines the editor and the stage portions of the app onto one screen, rather than siting them on separate screens as was the case previously. It also introduces a feature called “abilities” — aka functions/subroutines, in standard programming nomenclature — allowing users to grapple with more complex programming concepts as they build their apps. “There are hundreds of visual programming languages out there,” adds Leavitt, discussing the competitive landscape for initiatives seeking to make coding easier for kids. “Popular ones are Scratch, Alice and Blockly. I would not call these competitors, since they are all mostly the work of universities (although Blockly is by Google). And actually, John Maloney, who originally built Scratch and Scratch 2.0 at the MIT Media Lab, is one of our advisors. “There are several other companies that have emerged in the mobile ‘coding for kids’ space since we launched, but none of them are really programming languages. Most of them are more coding puzzles where users beat consecutively difficult levels, rather than open ended creation tools for anyone to build anything. Hopscotch is a digital toy that can be used to make other digital toys. Think 21st century Legos.”


Hopscotch, An iPad App That Helps Kids Learn To Code, Raises $1.2M

May 8, 2014, 7:00 AM PDT
By Liz Gannes
Articles
“Parents might say, ‘You should learn how to code,’” says Jocelyn Leavitt, co-founder and CEO of Hopscotch. “I think kids don’t necessarily respond to that, but if you’re like ‘Hey, would you like to build your own game?’ — kids are really excited about that.”
Leavitt’s Hopscotch app for iPad is filled with cute, colorful characters and ways to train them to do things like move across the screen, change shape and draw, based on input like tapping or the sound of clapping. The product is open-ended — kids decide what they want to build and put it into action. Hopscotch first launched last April at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Mobile conference, the predecessor to this fall’s Code/Mobile conference. Since then, the app has helped people save 1.5 million projects — which gives you a sense of how many people use it, as most every Hopscotch user have saved at least once — and compiled 57 million blocks of code. It’s also now easier to preview and debug programs, and to save functions for later use. And Hopscotch has raised $1.2 million from Resolute Ventures, Collaborative Fund and Kapor Capital, and expanded to a team of six in New York City. “We always wanted to create product that feels very accessible,” Leavitt said. “We almost want to talk less and less about computer programming because that in itself seems less accessible. We think of it even more as empowering people to create technology, which few people know how to build and create themselves.”
Asa Mathat Jocelyn Leavitt demos Hopscotch at Dive Into Mobile
Unlike teach-kids-to-code alternatives like Scratch and the broader world of programming languages, Hopscotch code can only be run on the iPad within its own app. But Leavitt, a former teacher, thinks of the app as a way to spark interest in the topic. “When you learn conditional logic and ideas around variables in Hopscotch, you can translate that to other programming languages,” she said. “I think the vehicle for learning those has to come from somebody learning to make something and having a contextualized use for that, rather than being taught in the abstract.”


Checking in on Hopscotch, the Learn-to-Code Build-Something App for iPad

Seed VC - II

Hopscotch is an open, mobile experiences platform for sports teams, venues, and event organizers that want to increase loyalty and generate new revenue streams. The company provides a package of plug-and-play mobile services, powered by an easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS), that delivers revenue, insights, and scale to businesses.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors	Revenue	Sources
11/15/2015	Seed VC - II	$1M	PLDT Capital	0 FY undefined	1
6/16/2014	Incubator/Accelerator		Subscribe to see more	0 FY undefined	10
5/8/2014	Seed VC	$99M	Subscribe to see more	0 FY undefined	10

Date	11/15/2015	6/16/2014	5/8/2014
Round	Seed VC - II	Incubator/Accelerator	Seed VC
Amount	$1M		$99M
Investors	PLDT Capital	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Valuation
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	1	10	10

First funding	Last Funding	Investor	Rounds	Type	Location
11/15/2015	11/15/2015	PLDT Capital	1 Seed VC - II	Corporate Venture	Philippines
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Company	Subscribe to see more	Incubator/Accelerator	New York
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Collab+Currency	Subscribe to see more	Venture Capital	New York
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Resolute Ventures	Subscribe to see more	Venture Capital	California
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Kapor Capital	Subscribe to see more	Venture Capital	California

First funding	11/15/2015	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000
Last Funding	11/15/2015	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000
Investor	PLDT Capital	Company	Collab+Currency	Resolute Ventures	Kapor Capital
Rounds	1 Seed VC - II	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Board Seats
Type	Corporate Venture	Incubator/Accelerator	Venture Capital	Venture Capital	Venture Capital
Location	Philippines	New York	New York	California	California

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