CarTrade’s IPO prospects and a vindication for Canaan Partners

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Editor's note: Last week CarTrade, the used automobile sales company, filed its draft prospectus for an initial public offering. This is a big moment for India’s internet business ecosystem. Investors and analysts alike will now have a ringside view of how retail and institutional investors warm up to two very different tech startups. There’s CarTrade, an internet-dependent company with a sound and stable business model. And then there’s the unicorn Zomato, a loss-making consumer tech enterprise whose business model has shaky legs.  We’ve written on the Zomato IPO before, so if you haven’t already read that, you must. Before we get to CarTrade, there’s this fascinating hindsight perspective on Canaan Partners, the Indian arm of the global venture capital fund that I would like to draw your attention to. Hindsight is 20:20. If you bring up the subject of Canaan Partners in Indian VC circles, nine out of ten times, the ecosystem would remember it as a fund that didn’t amount to much.  Canaan Partners entered India in 2006 as an arm of the global VC fund with a mandate to invest …