Indian Crowdfunding platform Wishberg.com to shut down

India's crowdfunding and social wishlist platform Wishberg.com has announced that portal will be shutting down in coming days.

In a blog post Wishberg team announced - "As a startup, data is your best friend. Reviewing those goals at the end of the year, we realised that we have trailed behind on few of them. For us a team, we have always believed in chasing bigger dreams and not take up smaller challenges. Keeping up with that belief, we will be sunsetting Wishberg in coming days while we give time to our users to go through their accounts and wishes."

Wishberg's founders - Pravin Jadhav (CEO) and Kulin Shah (COO) are joining online mobile recharge startup FreeCharge, and will lead its product & growth and partnerships & alliances, respectively.

Wishberg was founded by Pravin Jadhav and Kulin Shah in December 2011 as a social discovery site and the name was Tyche’d, it was in July last year when the startup was renamed and rebranded to Wishberg.com.

Almost a year before (April 2013) Wishberg raised it's first investment and raised $150,000 in funding from early-stage investment firm India Quotient, with participations from angel investors including Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of One97, and Uday Sodhi, CEO of HeadHonchos, among others

Wishberg got many accolades when it was launched and named among the top startups to be featured among the best products. The all of a sudden decision of shutting down the crowdfunding platform is disheartening for its many users. Although not many tech ideas was there in the portal wish funding lists nevertheless the portal is still receiving many wishes from users across India for crowdfunding.

India does not have many crowdfunding online platforms and Wishberg is among few crowdfunding platforms dedicatedly for India and was one of the firs such platform in India. The reason as why Crowdfunding platform like Wishberg doesn't make it to success in India is unknown as founders doesn't reveal as why they are moving crowdfunding model to online mobile recharge business.

Wishberg raises funds from India Quotient

Mumbai based startup Wishberg.com has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from early stage investment firm India Quotient, Wishberg is a social wishlist website where users can build, manage and track your wishes for free.

Wishberg lets you wish for almost anything from food to fashion, from books to movies, from adventures to travel, from cars to gadgets, yes everything indeed.

Early stage investment firm India Quotient usually targets pre-revenue startups for investment and invests anywhere between $50,000 and $500,000 (Rs.50 lakh to Rs.1.5 crore) per company and picks up stakes of between 10 and 20 per cent. The startup companies India Quotient choose are typically those that are at the pre-Series A stage of funding.

India Quotient has also invested in another online startup - InBetween, a quick food startup that specializes in sandwiches. India Quotient was founded by Anand Lunia founder of BrainVisa. Earlier IQ has also invested in early stage startups like IIMJobs.com, Red Quanta, MapMyTalent.in and DogSpot.in to name a few.

India Quotient was formed in June last year by former Seedfund partner Anand Lunia along with Madhukar Sinha (senior investment manager at Aavishkaar and earlier to that at PRADAN (Not-for-Profit).

Wishberg on other hand is a web startup conceptualized by Pravin Jadhav ans Ex-Rediff employee. Wishberg was renamed from its earlier name Tyche'd in November last year and was relased as public beta at same time. With one click users can discovers others in their social graph with similar matches and contextual social reviews. the platform provides localized information to users across 200+cities in 12 countries.