IBM acquires Red Hat

IBM closed its $34 Billion purchase of Red Hat, sealing the world’s second-largest technology deal ever and setting up the iconic U.S. company on a path to try to compete with top software purveyors in the cloud.

The 108-year-old International Business Machines Corp., once synonymous with mainframe computing, has been struggling to adopt cloud-related technologies. It’s playing catch-up to market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in offering computing and other software and services over the internet.

Having already fallen behind in the public cloud, IBM is betting big on the so-called hybrid cloud, which allows companies to simultaneously run programs on both their own internal servers and the big public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure.

Through Red Hat, IBM will offer clients the chance to merge their private and public clouds -- regardless of which provider they use. Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies will be matched with IBM’s industry expertise and sales teams in more than 175 countries. The platform will allow companies to run and manage their data and applications both on-site and on private and multiple public clouds.

Uber acquires Mighty AI

Uber has acquired computer vision startup Mighty AI to help advance its technology for self-driving cars.

Mighty AI specializes in computer vision, a field within artificial intelligence that is used to better understand or "label" the surroundings of vehicles that will be deployed autonomously.

Uber, which has become the most important ride-hailing operator, has been moving into new technologies that could see deployment of autonomous vehicles and even flying cars in the coming years. The news comes amid reports that Apple had acquired self-driving tech start-up Drive.ai to advance its own ambitions in the sector.

Dailyhunt acquires Local Play

Bengaluru based news and ebooks mobile app, Dailyhunt has acquired Bengaluru based hyperlocal video content and news content application, Local Play for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2018 by Gunjan Kejriwal and Prajwal P, LocalPlay has done significant process and product innovation for on ground news collection and production. LocalPlay had raised a seed round from Orios Venture Partners, Raveen Sastry, Sanjay Ramakrishnan, Dhimant Parekh, N Ravi Shankar and Gopinath G.

Launched in 2009 by Nokia employees Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, NewsHunt was acquired by Verse in 2012. In August 2015 NewsHunt rebranded itself as DailyHunt. Currently, Dailyhunt has grown into a news and local language content application with over 155 Mn app installs offering 100K news articles in 14 languages licensed from over 800 publication partners every day. The group claims that every month has more than 50 Mn users spend over six billion minutes on the app.

The company has raised more than $122.3 Mn (INR 870 Cr) in series of investments from investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge Capital, Matrix Partners, Omidyar Network, and Darby Overseas Investments. Going forward, Dailyhunt will further scale up and produce 5 Mn pieces of hyperlocal content annually, available exclusively on Dailyhunt.

Hexaware acquires Mobiquity

IT services company Hexaware Technologies Ltd has acquired US-based digital services firm Mobiquity for $182 Million in an all-cash deal. Hexaware is majority owned by private equity firm Baring Private Equity Asia. As of 31 March, Baring owned 62.59% in Hexaware.

With a presence across three continents, Mobiquity is one of the largest independent customer experience consulting firms specializing in creating frictionless multi-channel digital experiences using cloud technologies. Mobiquity creates digital products for well-known global brands such as Amazon Web Services, Rabobank, Philips, Wawa, Backbase and Otsuka.

Hexaware enters an exciting new phase of growth and capability with the acquisition of Mobiquity Inc. Mobiquity strengthens two of our key strategic offerings: Cloudify Everything and Customer Experience Transformation. We are seeing strong demand for these capabilities and, with this acquisition; we will be able to further accelerate our contributions to our customers’ business growth. The transaction involves an upfront payment of $131 million and deferred payouts of $51 million.

Forty-one percent of Hexaware revenue is from BFS (banking and financial services) but there is not much of banking in that. It’s largely capital markets and mortgage. We have a little bit of banking, but it is not core digital banking, which is the most important priority for all banks. Mobiquity is good at that. They have helped the largest bank in the Philippines on this front and are working with one of the largest Middle East banks for their digital banking platform.

Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail acquires Jaypore

Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd which retails brands such as Louis Philippe, Peter England and Van Heusen, has acquired ethnic apparel and lifestyle retailer Jaypore for Rs. 110 crore.

The deal will help ABFRL that also retails men and women’s western wear to tap into the fast-growing ethnic apparel market. Ethnic wear is the largest segment in the Indian fashion apparel market. While ABFRL has built a diversified portfolio of brands across different segments, ethnic wear space is currently under-represented.

Jaypore was set up in 2012. The company started out as an online platform to service the US market. However, the co-founders saw a huge demand coming from the domestic market and Jaypore was launched in India in 2013. The company sells apparel and accessories, and has a presence in both online and offline retail. It has two stores—one each in Delhi and Mumbai—and sells a curated collection of handmade and handcrafted apparel, jewelry and home textiles sourced from across India through its own website. The brand sells to over 60 countries.

ABFRL that also runs the fashion departmental store chain Pantaloons posted a turnover of ₹8,118 cr. in fiscal year 2019. ABFRL runs 2,714 branded stores in 750 cities in India, apart from its brands being retailed across 18,000 multi-brand outlets here.

Salesforce to acquire Tableau

Salesforce.com Inc. decided to buy big data firm Tableau Software Inc. for $15.3 Billion, marking the biggest acquisition in the company’s history as it looks to offer more data insights to it's clients.

Seattle-based Tableau has more than 86,000 customers, including tech heavyweights such as Verizon Communications Inc. and Netflix Inc. As part of the all-stock deal, Tableau shareholders will get 1.103 Salesforce shares, valuing the offer at $177.88 per share, representing a premium of 42% to Tableau's Friday closing price.

Salesforce deal comes days after Alphabet Inc. Google bought big-data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion and surpasses the $5.9 billion that the cloud-based software company paid to buy U.S. software maker MuleSoft in 2018.

Big data analytics is a complex process used to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations; market trends and customer preferences that often help companies make better business decisions. The San Francisco-based company said the deal is likely to add up to $400 million in its 2020 revenue, but would decrease adjusted profit by about 37 cents to 39 cents per share.

Manipal Group acquires Jigsaw Academy

Manipal Education & Medical Group has acquired Jigsaw Academy, online analytics and big data trainer for professionals and students. Manipal ProLearn, part of Manipal Global Education Services Pvt. Ltd, offers certification courses across technology, digital marketing, data sciences, project management and finance.

The acquisition will help MEMG streamline its digital marketing spends and offer a larger set of course offerings to its clients for reskilling and upskilling. Founded in 2011, Bengaluru-based Jigsaw Academy raised $3 million from Manipal Global Education Services in 2015. The company claims to have more than 50,000 learners across more than 30 countries. In 2017, Jigsaw Academy and the University of Chicago launched a data science and machine learning program.

Upgrading skills is increasingly becoming important for professionals, particularly in technology, fuelling demand for such courses. “Things are changing fast in technology. If one is not able to keep pace, there is a real fear of becoming obsolete like a phone or computer.

MEGM estimates the online reskilling and upskilling market at nearly ₹730,000 crore. There are several start-ups in the space, including the likes of Udacity, Coursera and upgrade, which are estimated to be growing over 40% year-on-year, according to media reports.

Go-Jek acquires AirCTO

Indonesia based ride-hailing startup Go-Jek announced its acquisition of Bengaluru based AirCTO, an artificial intelligence based recruitment platform for an undisclosed amount.

Go-Jek will use the acquisition to open its second engineering and product development centre in Gurgaon. As part of the deal, the AirCTO team will join Go-Jek with immediate effect and will look at building products that accelerate recruitments for Go-Jek. The company has also announced the opening of a new office in Gurgaon, for which Go-Jek plans to hire 100 employees aiming to reach a headcount of 500 in India by the year-end.

Other expansion plans include more acquisitions in India, with Go-Jek actively exploring the start-up space, particularly entities with expertise in engineering, design and product management. Go-Jek currently runs one of the largest JRuby, Clojure, Java and Go clusters in Asia. Its robust tech-infrastructure is built and managed by over 350 engineers, who manage operations across Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Indonesian company offers on-demand ordering of food, last-mile commuting, digital payments, shopping, hyper-local delivery, grocery delivery, and two dozen services on its super app. The app was first launched in January 2015 for consumers in Indonesia. Go-Jek now operates in 204 cities and regions in five Southeast Asian countries.

Google to acquire big data analytics company Looker

Google has announced plans to acquire data analytics platform Looker in a $2.6 Billion all-cash transaction. The deal is expected to close later this year, at which point Looker will become part of Google Cloud, helping serve Google customers a more “comprehensive analytics solution.

This move is consistent with Google’s recent multi-cloud strategy shift, which has included the launch of Anthos, a rebranded Google Cloud Services platform that plays nice with AWS and Azure. “Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making. The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation.

Founded in 2011, Looker is one of a number of platforms helping companies visualize and make sense of their vast pools of data by tapping myriad sources, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and MySQL. Looker had raised nearly $300 million since its inception, including an $81.5 million series D round of funding back in 2017 that was led by none other than Capital G — the investment unit of Google parent company Alphabet. Given the duo’s existing cloud partnership shared customers, and investment affiliations, today’s news shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.

This is a huge deal for Google Cloud, easily topping the $625 million it paid for Apigee in 2016. It marks the first major deal in the Kurian era as Google tries to beef up its market share. While the two companies share common customers, the addition of Looker should bring a net gain that could help them upsell to other parts of the Looker customer base.

Foursquare buys Placed from Snap Inc.

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc. on the heels of a fresh $150 Million investment led by The Raine Group. Placed is the biggest competitor to foursquare attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact of a digital campaign or ad. Up until now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare combined have measured more than $3 Billion in ad-to-store visits.

Placed launched in 2011 and raised $13.4 million before being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017. As part of the deal with Foursquare, the company’s Attribution product will henceforth be known as Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition also means that Placed powered by Foursquare will have more than 450 measurable media partners, including Twitter, Snap, Pandora and Waze. Moreover, more than 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are partnered with Placed or Foursquare.

It’s also worth noting that this latest investment of $150 million is the biggest financing round for Foursquare ever, and comes following a $33 million Series F last year. That last bit, about an independent location technology platform, is important here. Foursquare is 10 years old and has transformed from a consumer-facing location check-in app — a game, really — into location analytics and development platform.

The Pilgrim SDK fits into that top item on the list: developer tools. The Pilgrim SDK allows developers to embed location-smart experiences and notifications into their apps and services. But it also expands Foursquare’s access to data from beyond its own apps to the greater ecosystem, yielding the data it needs to power analytics tools for brands and publishers. With this acquisition, Placed will be able to leverage Foursquare’s existing map of 105 million places of interest across 190 countries, as well as tap into the measured U.S. audience of more than 100 million monthly devices.

Info Edge acquires iimjobs.com

Info Edge (India) Ltd, the operator of jobs site Naukri.com and real estate portal 99acres.com has agreed to acquire the company behind jobs portal iimjobs.com. Mumbai-listed Info Edge said in a stock-exchange filing it will buy Highorbit Careers Pvt. Ltd for Rs 80.82 crore ($11.6 million) in cash.

Info Edge said the proposed acquisition will help it consolidate its position in the online recruitment solutions segment where Naukri.com already has a leadership position. Delhi-based iimjobs.com is focused on middle- to senior-level hiring in fields such as finance, consulting, business process outsourcing, technology, and sales and marketing.

Highorbit was started by Tarun Matta in 2008 as a side project while he was still working with RockeTalk, a multi-platform mobile app. He left RockeTalk in 2010 to focus on the portal full time. An IIM Indore alumnus, Matta previously worked with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, CSC, Neilsoft Ltd and ITC Infotech.

The company had raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from One97 Communications, India Venture Partners, Shailesh Vikram Singh, Pallav Nadhani, Abhishek Rungta, Anand Lunia, Sachin Garg and others in March 2012. In November 2016, iimjobs.com secured $2 million (Rs 13 crore then) in its Series A round of funding led by early-stage investment firm India Quotient. Tracxn Labs and Calcutta Angels also participated in this round.

Scaleworks acquires AI commerce provider SearchSpring

Scaleworks, the San Antonio based private equity firm acquires startups with between $4 Million and $10 Million in annual run rate and works to grow them, while additionally extending 12 – to – 16 month venture loans to B2B businesses as much as 6 times their monthly recurring revenue. Scaleworks bought eight companies with its first $60 million fund, which collectively grew 52% to $80 million in revenue last year.

In February, it launched a second fund — this one totaling $80 million — to snatch up startups with greater than $4 million in ARR, and it announced one of the first acquisition targets today. Scaleworks says it has acquired SearchSpring, a privately funded Colorado-based ecommerce company that provides AI-powered search and navigation products to direct-to-consumer brands like Moen, Kate Somerville, Volcom, Wet Seal, Natori, Bikini.com, Wildfox, Lime Crime, Wine Enthusiast, Charles & Colvard, SaintBernard Sports, and Bethesda Game Studios. Since its founding in 2007, SearchSpring says it has powered over 9.2 billion searches.

SearchSpring’s platform — which integrates with Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Mivaworks — works by ingesting companies’ catalogs, using natural language processing to break terms into their component pieces, and thoroughly indexing those pieces to suss out relationships among them. It’s able to tell the difference between a shirt dress and a dress shirt, for instance, and to correct typos and mistakes in search queries while quietly hiding irrelevant product types and accessories in results.

Moreover, it optionally boosts products with the highest conversion rate to the top and captures shopping behavior to supplement product data. SearchSpring joins recurring payments platform Chargify, content ingestion network provider Filestack, automated user research company Qualaroo, embedded analytics suite Keen, and office mail automation startup Earth Class Mail in Scaleworks’ growing portfolio. Among the firm’s successful exits to date are FollowUp, Mailgun, and Assembla.

Zendesk acquires conversational platform Smooch

Customer service software provider Zendesk revealed that it has acquired Montreal based Smooch the company behind an eponymous business-to-customer messaging platform, for an undisclosed sum. Zendesk also took the wraps off WhatsApp and Slack integrations and announced new apps available through its Zendesk Marketplace.

For the uninitiated, Smooch’s AWS-hosted suite collates messages across web, mobile, and social messaging and combines user activity and existing profile data, enabling admins to create more tailored experiences. With Smooch’s embeddable software development kit and APIs for Android, iOS, and the web, a hotel, for instance, could give guests the ability to ping staff on-property, and an online retailer could manage issues like incorrect shipments and returns across channels.

Smooch supports speech on popular voice assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant, along with text on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, WeChat, Telegram, Twitter DM, Viber, Kakao Talk, SMS, and Rich Communication Services (RCS). Zendesk notes that Smooch has the distinction of being one of the largest providers of WhatsApp Business integration, which allows organizations to manage and send non-promotional automated messages to customers — like appointment reminders, shipping info, or event tickets — for a fixed rate.

Thanks to Smooch, Zendesk says that customers in its early access program can now reach users directly through Chat, its live chat solution for mobile and the web. Smooch brings real-time push notifications, as well as standard messaging features, like typing indicators, timestamps, cloud message storage, media support (for emojis, GIFs, images, videos, and file attachments), and read and delivery receipts.

Freshworks acquires Natero

Customer engagement service Freshworks which you may still remember under its old name of Freshdesk, has acquired Natero, a customer success service with some AI/ML smarts that helps businesses prevent churn and manage their customers.

The acquisition will help the company complete its mission to provide its users with a 360-degree view of their customers. Freshdesk started out with a focus on customer support and then added additional functionality for marketers and other roles over time. Today, however, companies want this full 360-degree view of a customer and are able to offer differentiated service to their top customers, for example. In many ways, the acquisition of Natero closes the loop here.

Natero will continue to exist as a stand-alone product, but it will also become part of the Freshworks 360 suite, Freshwork’s integrated customer engagement suite. Ahead of today’s acquisition, Natero had raised a total of $3.3 million. That’s not a lot for a startup that launched back in 2012, but Soules noted how he was able to fund the company’s expansion through revenue. The two companies did not disclose the acquisition price.

Spencer to acquire Nature’s Basket

Goenka group owned Spencer Retail Ltd is set to acquire gourmet retail chain Nature’s Basket Ltd for INR 300 crore, as it seeks to expand its footprint in the Western region, the company filings with the BSE show. The acquisition is subject to shareholders approval.

The deal will give Spencer’s access to 36 Nature’s Basket stores in prime locations of Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. The Kolkata-based retail chain will also get access to Nature’s Basket’s online platform.

Natures Basket, which began operations in 2005, sells fruits, vegetables, fish and meat, besides fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and staples. The retail chain is known for stocking up on niche gourmet products, including imported food such as Italy’s Grana Padano Cheese, Blue Cheese, Parma Ham, and bluish-purple chips from the US. It competes with the likes of Future Retail Ltd’s Food Hall, and Alibaba Group-backed Big Basket.

In 2017-18, Nature’s Basket contributed just about ₹291 crore to Godrej Industries’ consolidated revenue of ₹9,968.83 crore, the company’s annual report shows. Spencer’s Retail Ltd, a separate listed entity, had earned total revenue of ₹1,051.81 crore in 2017-18, on a stand-alone basis, according to BSE filings. In 2018-19, it generated a total revenue of ₹2,214.98 crore.

Netflix buys StoryBots

Netflix Inc. acquired the StoryBots children’s media brand as the world’s largest streaming service providers to challenge rival Walt Disney Co.’s kid-friendly online platform scheduled to start in November.

Under the deal, StoryBots creators Gregg and Evan Spiridellis will produce more original content including series and short-form specials, Netflix said Thursday, without disclosing terms. Los Gatos, California-based Netflix has more than 148 million paid subscribers worldwide and spent about $7 billion on programming last year.

Buying StoryBots and expanding its programming may help Netflix draw more children and parents, a battleground market as family-focused Disney plans to start offering movies and shows from its Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars franchises online later this year. Netflix already streams “Ask the StoryBots," which features cylindrical animated characters addressing queries such as “What makes a bird a bird," and “What are good carbohydrates."

While Netflix and Disney square off over families, competition in the broader industry is likely to get even hotter. Apple Inc., AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. are also among the cash-rich giants planning streaming services as TV viewers shift away from cable TV to video-on-demand platforms.

Reliance Brands to buy Hamleys

Reliance Brands Ltd, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd, acquired British toy retailer Hamleys for 620 crore in an all-cash deal. Reliance Brands signed an agreement to acquire a 100% stake in Hamleys Global Holdings Ltd from Hong Kong based C. banner International.

Hamleys, founded in London in 1760, is one of the world’s oldest retailers of toys and has changed hands several times. It was bought in June 2003 by the Baugur Group, an Icelandic investment company. In the same year, Hamleys was delisted from the London stock market by Baugur Group, which had paid $68.8 million for the company. In 2012, it was sold for $78.4 million to France’s Groupe Ludendo. Hamleys reported losses of £12 million in 2017, when it last reported its financials.

Hamleys has 167 stores across 18 countries. In India, Reliance Retail has the master franchise for the brand and operates 88 stores across 29 cities. This worldwide acquisition places Reliance on the frontline of global retail.

Medlife acquires e-pharmacy Myra

Healthcare services platform Medlife International Private Limited has acquired medicine-delivery app Myra Medicines in a cash and stock deal. The acquisition will support Medlife’s pharmacy business and help it accrue profits. At the same time, Medlife will consolidate and strengthen the delivery of medicines and extend the reach to more Indian cities.

It claims to leverage data science and technology to automate a highly operational business their prediction algorithm is able to ensure 95% order fulfillment with just 25 days of inventory holding and delivery costs of fewer than 40 per order achieving near positive unit economics.

The company leverages its express delivery abilities to maintain lowest order level costs. The company claims that its on-demand model is built on the back of a best in class ordering and warehousing system that ensures orders are picked packed and dispatched post compliance and legal in just 5 minutes.

Medlife was founded in 2014 by Kumar and Prashant Singh and began operations with online drug deliveries before expanding into online consultations with medical professionals and diagnostics. The company is currently looking to raise capital from external sources. This is the second reported acquisition that Medlife has made this year. In January, it bought Mumbai-based digital healthcare platform and home diagnostics services company MedLabz for an undisclosed sum.

Publicis to buy Epsilon for $4.4 Billion

Publicis group SA agreed to buy digital marketing firm Epsilon from Alliance Data Systems Corp. for $4.4 Billion in cash, propelling the French advertising group further beyond a weakening conventional ad business in its biggest takeover yet.

Epsilon’s services span loyalty programs to email marketing and its Conversant unit collects consumer data including transactions, location and web activity. A three-way battle for online marketing dollars is underway as e-commerce explodes; pitting the traditional ad companies such as Publicis, WPP Plc. and Omnicom Group Inc. against global consulting firms and the giant tech platforms: Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.

The ad firms easily dominated traditional advertising in newspapers, billboards and television before the market went into decline. In the digital world, they are up against companies that harvest data from billions of social media users and often get closer to consumers by handling their transactions.

The owner of agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett Worldwide has a patchy record in managing acquired companies: digital ad technology is evolving rapidly and the group posted a loss in 2016 after writing down the value of one of its digital businesses. Publicis made one of the industry’s boldest bets on ad technology in 2015 with the $3.7 billion purchase of Boston-based Sapient, and Sadoun has staked the company’s future on digital tech businesses that he sees as “strategic game changers."