MUMBAI: MIH Web Private Limited (MIH India), the Indian arm of South African media company Naspers has completed the 100 per cent acquisition of Bixee.com and Pixrat.com, adding strategic properties and technology to capitalise on India's growing Internet market.

In addition to all assets of Bixee.com including technologies, the founders and team of Bixee.com will become a part of MIH India, asserts an official release.

Bixee.com and Pixrat.com are a part of RHR Networks based out of Bangalore and jointly founded by ex-Yahoo employees Rajesh Warrier and Ruban Phukan.

MIH India has already beta launched its networking, blogging and photo sharing web site called ibibo.com. With this acquisition it claims to further strengthen its technology and increase its network of consumer internet properties in India.

MIH India CEO Ashish Kashyap said, "With this acquisition, MIH India has commenced setting up an engineering operation in Bangalore in addition to its HQ at Gurgaon. The team will continue to work on augmenting and further developing Bixee.com and other related technologies and develop other innovative applications for the Indian Internet and Mobile space."

"This acquisition is clearly in line with MIH India's objective of bottom up building, investing and acquiring internet companies in the Indian market place," he added.

Commenting on the acquisition Warrier said, "We are very excited about being a part of MIH India and are looking forward to working closely as our thinking is completely aligned with MIH India's plans."

Phukan added, "This relationship adds value to our creation and we are extremely positive about our new association."

Bixee.com, launched in October 2005, is a vertical search technology and is also India's first job search engine targeting the Indian market.

Pixrat.com, launched early this year, is a social picture bookmarking website that lets users collect, organise and share pictures from anywhere on the web.