South Africa-based media conglomerate Naspers has linked up through a circuitous route with a funder of social networking website Facebook in order to back a Brazilian fashion website.
Through its corporate venturing arm, MIH, Naspers has led a $17m funding round for Brandsclub.
The investment was made in a syndicate with Trayas, a venture capital fund run by Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung. Hommels has previously invested in music networking site Spotify, Facebook and online phone operator Skype while Trayas has invested heavily in online shopping.
In the past few months, Trayas has invested £4.7m in Turkey’s Markafoni, was part of the $20m series B round of Russia’s KupiVIP.ru and bought into Australia’s brandsExclusive, FashionandYou.com in India, Fashionfriends.ch in Switzerland and Canada’s Beyond The Rack, according to Optaros and Techcrunch research.
Founded in March 2009, Brazil’s BrandsClub has been riding the flash sale site wave and has more than 1.1 million users in the country and is also operating in Mexico.
MIH’s connection to Facebook is more convoluted as it originally bought 46.5% of Tencent, a Chinese instant messaging service with a bigger market capitalization than eBay or Yahoo!, in 2001 before it was reduced to 35% after Tencent’s flotation.
Tencent has used its profits to buy 10% of Digital Sky Technologies for $300m in April after the Russian VC acquired stakes in Facebook and Zynga, although these are kept in its separate Global fund.
MIH has been one of the most global and successful corporate venturing vehicles. See related content: