Murugavel Janakiraman is the founder and CEO of one of India’s largest matrimonial website companies, BharatMatrimony.
In the late 1990s he was working in the USA as a technology consultant. In his spare time, he started a web portal aimed at the Tamil community. The website included a couple of pages of matrimonial ads (Actually just two pages, one for groom and one for bride) and Mr Murugavel noticed that these drew a large amount of traffic. That gave him the idea for launching a matrimonial website with different sections aimed at all the main communities and groups in India. He launched BharatMatrimony in 2000. A lot of people told him they doubted it would succeed – a common criticism was that Indians were too conservative to feel comfortable using online sites to find a life partner. But he thought that although getting engaged is still very much a family affair, parents are more comfortable nowadays with children choosing their own partner. He regards online matchmaking as a new way of marrying couples which accommodates both the spouses and their families. Mr Murugavel has tried to spin-off sites aimed at different languages and communities.
Consim Info. Pvt. Ltd, of which BharatMatrimony is a part, is also parent company of CommunityMatrimony.com, CommunityMatrimony.com, EliteMatrimony.com,IndiaProperty.com, blog.bharatmatrimony.com, MatrimonyGifts.com, tv.BharatMatrimony.com, IndiaList.com and ClickJobs.com. Consim Info Pvt Ltd has set a Guinness World Record for creating the Largest Wedding Photo Album on Matrimony Day, April 14, 2012