HomeShop18 acquires Shop CJ Network

Noida based television home shopping network and online marketplace, HomeShop18, the part of Network18 Media & Investments, has acquired a 74% stake in Shop CJ Network. Shop CJ Network is an equal joint venture between private equity investor Providence Equity Partners and Korean firm CJ O Shopping. The deal is said to be anywhere between $27.45 Mn to $30.5 Mn.

With this deal, Providence Equity Partners is also looking for an exit from Shop CJ Network and will sell its stake completely. Shop CJ network, earlier known as Star CJ, was launched in 2009, as a 50:50 joint venture between Star India and CJO Shopping. Later in 2014, Star India sold its stake to Providence Equity Partners for $63 Mn.

Media group Network18 had launched HomeShop18 television channel in April 2008 and its online marketplace HomeShop18.com in January 2011. It is backed by PE firm SAIF Partners with funds managed by OCP Asia. It also counts South Korea’s GS Home Shopping as a strategic investor.

Its revenues are derived from the commission it gets from the sale of products by its vendors through its platforms. It still generates the bulk of its revenues from television shopping business. Now, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) of Mukesh Ambani owns Homeshop18 through the acquisition of Network18 which happened in 2014. During that same year, HomeShop18 also scrapped its proposed $75 Mn public issue, after seven months of filing on the NYSE.

Flipkart acquires F1 Info solutions

India’s leading e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has acquired mobile repair chain F1 Info Solutions as it looks to improve its after sales service offerings to customers on its platform.

Smartphones account for over 50 per cent of the sales (by value) on Flipkart, making it the most important category for the Indian e-tailer. With F1 Info Solutions, the company will gain access to its own chain of service centres across the country. F1 Info Solutions will become a part of Jeeves, a firm that Flipkart invested in 2014. Jeeves specializes in providing after-sales service for large and small home appliances and furniture.

Following the acquisition, Flipkart will be able to monetize its customers across the lifecycle of a product, rather than just at the time of sale. According to the company, F1 Info Solutions has 158 centres and these are located in 135 cities across the country. The firm currently employs around 1,000 people who handle around 50,000 service calls every month. F1 Info is also a certified partner for several global consumer technology majors such as Apple, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Asus.

The development comes at a time when the ecommerce giant is gearing up to sell refurbished smartphones ahead of Diwali. According to sources, Flipkart-certified refurbished smartphones will soon be sold on the online marketplace and offline outlets. To that end, the company is looking to team up with distributors for offline sale, as part of a move aimed at lowering high return rates of handsets.

Ebix acquired Paul Merchants

Ebix Inc., the parent firm of digital payments company Itz Cash Card Ltd, has acquired the money transfer business of Paul Merchants Ltd through its Indian affiliate. The deal, valued at $40.7 Million. The acquisition will be done by YouFirst Money Express Pvt. Ltd, which was acquired by Ebix in August 2017.

Paul Merchants is a listed firm offering international money transfer and foreign exchange services. The company’s inward remittance exchange comprises over 20,000 distribution outlets and 165 branches. The firm processes about 6 million transactions every year. It also controls 35% of Western Union’s inward remittance flows into India. Paul Merchants operates as an agent of Western Union and is the largest international remittance firm in India.

While Ebix ItzCash is the largest domestic remittance firm in the country, handling a business volume of $100 million a month, the acquisition of Paul Merchants will serve to consolidate Ebix’s position as the largest international remittance firm in India. Ebix is present in more than 40 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, the US and the UK. The company powers multiple platforms across the world in the field of life, annuity, health, property and casualty insurance, processing over $100 billion in insurance premiums annually.

The transaction will increase the distribution network of Ebix ItzCash as well. ItzCash already has over 75,000 physical retail outlets. After the acquisition is completed, the outlets will number 114,000. ItzCash is a digital payments firm offering payment services like prepaid cards, money transfer and e-wallet to individual customers. The company offers cash management solutions and payment processing services to companies. It also provides services like collection and disbursement management services to the government. ItzCash was acquired by Ebix in May this year for a consideration of Rs800 crore.

Paytm to acquire Travel portal Via.com

Flush with funds from Japan Softbank, digital wallet and e-commerce company Paytm is eyeing another acquisition. The payments firm has held preliminary talks to acquire online travel company via.com. Paytm, which is run by One97 Communications Ltd, is looking to invest close to $80 million to acquire the Bengaluru-based travel portal.

In March this year, the Alibaba-backed Paytm tied up with US-based online travel portal Priceline Group’s Booking.com, to expand its travel business. The company then said it will invest Rs 300 crore to further grow this business and that it is also looking to ramp up its Bengaluru-based travel marketplace team to over 250 people in the next two quarters. Paytm’s travel marketplace enables users to book hotels, flights, trains and bus tickets on a fast, secure and convenient platform. In January 2017, the Noida-headquartered company claimed to have crossed $500 million in annualized gross merchandise value.

Via.com, owned and operated by Flightraja Travels Pvt Ltd, was founded in 2007 as an offline business-to-business travel site. It currently functions as a travel deals aggregator and ticket booking site. Its inventory includes ticketing in flights, hotels, holiday packages as well as car and bus services. The firm had raised $5 million from Indo US Venture Partners (now Kalaari Capital) in 2007 and followed it up with a $10 million round from Sequoia Capital in December 2009.

Following its $200 million funding from Alibaba and SAIF Partners into to its e-commerce arm in March this year and $1.4 billion from SoftBank in May this year, Paytm has been on a multi-pronged expansion drive. It has made a number of investments and acquisitions and effected key appointments, internal movements, and new business strategies. Earlier this month, the company was in talks to acquire deal discovery app Little and online deals startup Nearbuy to strengthen its hyperlocal play.

Zomato acquires delivery startup Runnr

Food technology startup Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd has acquired delivery start-up Runnr as part of a widely expected, all stock deal that would help the former significantly shore up its food delivery business, amid intense competition from rapidly growing rivals such as Swiggy.

The deal also hands out a lifeline to Runnr which has struggled to raise funds in the recent past. It has raised about $20-25 million since it started out in 2015 from investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Runnr was a product of a merger between hyperlocal delivery start-up Roadrunnr and food-ordering start-up TinyOwl.

Goyal said Runnr was already fulfilling about 300,000 orders a month. He added that Runnr founder Mohit Kumar will remain chief executive and will continue to work on the strategic vision for the start-up with the rest of his team. He said the acquired firm will continue to be run independently by Kumar.

Prior to its buyout of Runnr, Zomato used to aggregate restaurants on its platform and works with third-party delivery partners such as Runnr and Grab to execute deliveries. In September 2015, Zomato had picked up a minority stake in Grab (Grab a Grub Services Pvt. Ltd) to bolster its food delivery business.

Paytm to acquire Nearbuy and Little

Paytm, operated by One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd, is in advanced talks to acquire two deals platforms, Nearbuy and Little. The acquisitions of Nearbuy (formerly Groupon India) and Little Internet Pvt. Ltd, both of which offer discount deals at restaurants, salons and commercial establishments, will allow Paytm to boost its presence in the hyperlocal space.

In the past two years, Paytm has been in a hyper-expansion mode. From being a digital payments platform, the Alibaba-backed firm lets user’s book movies, make reservations for hotels and travel. Separately, Paytm’s e-commerce venture Paytm Mall is scaling up rapidly to take on Flipkart and Amazon. Last month, Paytm acquired a majority stake in ticketing platform Insider.in to allow events on Insider.in to show up on Paytm.

Gurugram-headquartered Nearbuy, which broke away from its NASDAQ-listed parent Groupon Inc. in 2015, was scouting for fresh equity. Groupon Inc. had sold some of its majority stake in Nearbuy to Sequoia India—which spent $20 million for the acquisition—as part of an organizational re-shuffle. The firm was subsequently re-branded Nearbuy. In 2016, the firm raised $2.2 million in debt from Blacksoil Capital. But both Nearbuy and its rival Little struggled to expand.

In July 2015, deals discovery app Little, which was started by the founders of fashion label Zovi, raised $50 million from Paytm, SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management. It then set a target of generating annualized gross sales of $170 million but missed it by a big margin. SAIF Partners is also a large minority investor in Paytm. Paytm, which launched its payments bank in May, raised a mammoth $1.4 billion in equity infusion from SoftBank Group Corp. in the same month. The round valued One97 Communications at $7 billion.

1mg acquires Dawailelo

Gurugram based digital healthcare platform 1mg has acquired Varanasi based Dawailelo.com. Post-acquisition, the team will be working with the 1mg ePharmacy team. The acquisition will help the 1mg team to expand the company’s footprint across most parts of India.

This acquisition comes on the heels of 1mg’s recent $15 Mn Series C funding. The new funds were fuelled in by HBM Healthcare Investments along with existing investors Sequoia India, Maverick Capital Ventures, Omidyar Network and Kae Capital. 1mg has been on an acquisition spree since last year. In April 2016, 1mg had raised $6 Mn from Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Omidyar Network and Deep Kalra (co-founder of travel portal MakeMyTrip).

Founded in 2013, Dawailelo is a tech-based facilitator in the healthcare space. It helps individuals buy medicines, consult with doctors and get lab tests done. Dawailelo was co-founded by duo Aditya Agrawal (CEO) and Arpit Sarin. Agrawal has an MBA in marketing from Banaras Hindu University and co-founder Arpit Sarin has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

On the other hand 1mg, earlier called HealthkartPlus, was the drug search business of Healthkart, which was rebranded and spun off into a separate entity as 1mg in April 2015. The company operates an online marketplace for medicines apart from facilitating doctor’s appointment and diagnostic test booking. The company claims to have over 10 Mn app downloads.

Freshworks acquires Zarget

Enterprise software firm Freshworks Inc., previously Freshdesk, had acquired Zarget, a website analytics start-up backed by marquee Investors including Sequoia Capital. This marks the ninth acquisition for Freshworks in less than three years. It had acqui-hired chatbot start-up Joe Hukum, data integration platform Pipemonk and social media customer service firm Airwoot, among others.

Founded in 2015, Zarget offers tools to businesses and marketers to understand user behaviour on websites. According to the company, its suite of solutions—which include a click map of visitors, tests to determine the webpages that are doing better and other patented tools deployed through Google Chrome extensions—deliver actionable insights to increase user engagement.

Zarget was started by former Zoho executives Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar and is based in Chennai. The start-up received a seed investment from Freshworks’ Mathrubootham and went on to raise $7.5 million over two rounds from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India.

Zarget was built to help marketers make informed decisions on their online properties without the need for deep technical resources or large budgets. Together with Freshworks, Zarget expect to accelerate the digital marketing evolution and help our customers further transform the way they market with combined expertise and solutions.

Twitch acquired ClipMine

In an announcement about a set of new discovery tools, Amazon-owned video game streaming site Twitch also unveiled that it recently acquired Palo Alto-based video indexing platform ClipMine. The startup’s technology is now being put to use to translate visual information in videos – like objects, text, logos and scenes – into metadata that can help people more easily find the streams they want to watch.

Launched back in 2015, ClipMine had originally introduced a platform designed for crowdsourced tagging and annotations. The idea then was to offer a technology that could sit over top videos on the web – like those on YouTube, Vimeo or DailyMotion – that allowed users to add their own annotations. This, in turn, would help other viewers find the part of the video they wanted to watch, while also helping video publishers learn more about which sections were getting clicked on the most.

The company later pivoted to focus on the e-sports industry, with tools that could extract information from game videos like player names, game type, number of gaming sessions per stream, and more. It also shifted away from the idea of crowdsourcing to take advantage of other technologies, like computer vision and machine learning.

Twitch’s interest in the company’s deep learning-based video indexing platform was due to its ability to analyze video content – like gamer’s streams – to identify what’s taking place in those streams, who’s playing and other variables. It has now put this technology to use with the launch of new stream discovery tools for Blizzard Entertainment’s “Overwatch” and “Hearthstone.” In the directories for those game streams, viewers are able to filter channels by a number of factors, including by hero on “Overwatch” streams, by game mode, player rank, number of wins, and by hero class on “Hearthstone” streams.

Genpact acquires OnSource

Business process outsourcing firm Genpact Ltd has acquired US based OnSource, an inspection-as-a-service (IaaS) provider for the insurance industry, for an undisclosed amount. The deal will help Genpact gain access to advanced digital inspection technologies to claims management services.

Genpact, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, said the transaction builds upon its recent acquisition of BrightClaim and National Vendor that have expanded its US claims management capabilities. Massachusetts-based OnSource caters to property and casualty insurance companies and their customers.

OnSource enables insurance companies to analyze the claims through photo inspections. Policyholders and claimants can use self-inspection apps or OnSource network of photo field inspectors and quality assurance analysts. OnSource ability to disrupt insurance claims operations is a critical addition to our digital-led insurance service offerings.

In 2016, more than 40% of Genpact revenues were derived from clients in the financial services industry, which includes insurance, according to its annual report. Genpact started its operations as a captive business process services provider for GE’s financial services business. The company began to servicing outside clients from 2005. In 2016, business process services contributed 81% to its total revenues of $2.57 billion. Most of Genpact employees are based out of India. It has centres in Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Kolkata.

Facebook acquires Ozlo

After shutting down one of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as chatbots defied the human generated algorithms and started communicating in their own language, Facebook has acquired an AI startup Ozlo to enhance its Messenger’s Personal assistant.

The four-year-old California-based startup that specializes in understanding text-based conversations claims that its virtual assistants can understand and provide answers to questions which do not have simple “yes” or “no”. Ozlo has raised $14 million from a number of investors. The startup has 30 employees, majority of whom would be joining Messenger in Facebook’s offices in either Menlo Park (California) or Seattle (Washington).

The social media giant on Sunday pulled the plug on its AI system because things got out of hand. The AI did not start shutting down computers worldwide or something of the sort, but it stopped using English and started using a language that it created. Initially, the AI agents used English to converse with each other but later, they created a new language that only AI systems could understand, thus, defying the purpose of the researchers. Earlier this year, Messenger’s product head Stan Chudnovsky said Facebook was focused on text-based AI because voice conversations like that of Apple or Google required an extra step.

BookMyShow acquires Nfusion

Online entertainment ticketing company BookMyShow has acquired video-on-demand platform Nfusion for an undisclosed amount, a move that will help the Mumbai based firm enhance its audio streaming offerings.

Nfusion was set up in the Middle East in 2009 by Shoaib G.M. Khan, Sivagurunathan S. and Prabhakar Reddy. The HD video- on-demand platform allowed users to stream videos online. Dar said that strengthening the audio offerings is part of BookMyShow efforts to become a complete entertainment destination. Nfusion had a library of 1.5 million songs and are now making available curated music that will help listeners discover many more tracks.

Kuber will play an instrumental role in driving partnerships with music labels and distributors, creating exclusive audio content for BookMyShow users, and product marketing. In 2013, BookMyShow had acquired Chennai-based online ticketing player TicketGreen. It then acquired a majority stake in Bengaluru-based social media analytics start-up Eventifier in 2015 and Chennai-based fan relationship management (FRM) solutions provider, Fantain Sports in 2016.

In 2017, BookMyShow acquired Hyderabad-based online movie ticketing platform MastiTickets, invested in Pune-based DIY platform Townscript and also acquired Mumbai-based local food and restaurant recommendation engine, Burrp.

Persistent Systems to acquire Parx Werk

Indian Information technology services provider Persistent Systems Ltd has agreed to acquire Swiss Firm Parx Werk AG to strengthen its expertise in Salesforce Software.

Parx is a certified partner in Germany, Austria and Switzerland of Salesforce, an American cloud computing company that provides a cloud-based customer relationship management software. This is the second acquisition by Persistent of a Salesforce partner since March last year, when it had agreed to acquire Australia’s PRM Cloud Solutions Pty Ltd for an undisclosed amount.

Parx was incorporated in 2001. The company reported revenue of 8 million Swiss francs for the year ended December 2016. It recorded a 28% annual compound growth in revenue from 2014. Prior to its acquisition of Australia’s PRM Solutions, Persistent had signed an agreement in January 2016 to acquire Citrix Systems’ CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager Product lines for an undisclosed amount through its US subsidiary.

In 2015, Persistent had made two acquisitions. It acquired Ireland-based technology firm Aepona Holdings Ltd and US-based software company Akumina Inc. content management services business. Data, digital, IoT (internet of things) and platforms are the foundation of software-driven businesses. Parx brings a deep business domain understanding that complements our technology expertise.

Advent International acquires Dixcy Textiles

Advent International the leading US-based private equity investor, has acquired Dixcy Textiles Pvt. Ltd, the South Indian firm which sells leading innerwear brand Dixcy Scott.

The transaction is Advent’s fourth investment in India since 2015 following its purchase of equity stakes in Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals, QuEST Global Services and ASK Group. Dixcy Scott, endorsed by Bollywood star Salman Khan, competes with Page Industries Ltd, the licensee for the Jockey brand in India; Rupa and Co. Ltd, the owner of MacroMan, Frontline and Euro brands; Lux Industries Ltd, the owner of the Lux Cozi brand; and Dollar Industries Ltd, which sells brands such as Bigboss and Club in India.

Founded in 1982, Tirupur-based Dixcy is the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of several leading innerwear brands, including Dixcy Scott, Dixcy Scott UNO, Dixcy Josh and Dixcy & Slimz. The company also sells a premium range of products including casual wear such as track pants, shorts and polo t-shirts. Additionally, Dixcy has begun to expand internationally by placing its products in stores across the Middle East and Singapore, stated the company release. The company employs over 3,500 people and generated sales of Rs780 crore ($120 million) in fiscal year 2017.

The Indian underwear market is currently estimated at Rs24,000 crore and the segment has grown at 15% over 2010-15, according to a 2016 report by Intimate Apparel Association of India and Wazir Advisors. The underwear market is estimated to continue at the same growth rate over the next five years and is expected to become a Rs47,000 crore market, which is nearly 8% of the total estimated apparel market, by 2020, said the report.

Axis bank to buy Freecharge

Private sector lender Axis Bank Ltd is nearing a deal to buy digital payments platform Freecharge for Rs 350-400 crore in cash, giving much needed breathing space to Freecharge parent company Snapdeal, which is separately in talks to sell itself to larger rival Flipkart.

By buying Freecharge, Axis Bank will get a popular digital payments brand as well as access to high-quality technology that traditional companies typically struggle to build compared with internet start-ups. Freecharge had also held lengthy talks with Paytm (One97 Communications Ltd) but chose to go with Axis Bank as the bank offered a higher price.

The sale of Freecharge will mark the most stunning collapse in India’s start-up world, even more so than that of its parent company, which has seen its fortunes dip since the start of 2016. Snapdeal bought Freecharge for $400 million in April 2015 in what was then the largest start-up deal in India. Last year, Freecharge hit the market to raise funds separately. Until late January, Snapdeal was confident Freecharge would raise fresh capital at a valuation of $700-900 million.

The Snapdeal founders, and venture capital (VC) firms Nexus Venture and Kalaari Capital have been locked in a boardroom battle that has resulted in Snapdeal and Freecharge passing up funding deals, cutting jobs and being forced to seek buyers. SoftBank disagreed with the others over the firm’s valuation in a potential sale or funding round.

Michael Kors to acquire Jimmy Choo

Michael Kors Holdings Ltd agreed to buy Jimmy Choo Plc. for about $1.2 Billion, clinching the London based maker of strappy stilettos, handbags and perfume.

The handbag maker will pay 230 pence a share for the luxury shoemaker. The price is equal to about 17.5 times Jimmy Choo’s adjusted Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for 2016. The Jimmy Choo brand rose to prominence in the late 1990s, boosted by high-profile devotees including the late Princess Diana and the fictional Carrie Bradshaw in television series “Sex and the City.”

The deal comes amid consolidation in the luxury industry, with Michael Kors rival Coach Inc. agreeing to buy Kate Spade & Co. in early 2017. Jimmy Choo was acquired by private-equity investors three times before being bought by JAB Holding Co. for more than £500 million in 2011.

Jimmy Choo was started in 1996 by British Vogue editor Tamara Mellon and designer Jimmy Choo. Its stilettos, which often cost north of $1,000, quickly became a favorite among celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Princess Diana. Jimmy Choo has more than 150 stores around the world.

Yatra acquires Air Travel Bureau

Yatra, the NASDAQ listed online travel Company, has entered into an agreement to acquire Air Travel Bureau Ltd, which it says is India’s largest independent corporate travel services provider, with gross bookings of Rs 1500 crores, and a client base of over 400 large and medium businesses across India.

ATB is a 30 year old company and claims that it can help companies save up to 20% of their corporate travel costs. For ATB, they’ll also get access to Yatra’s aggregation of hotels, which they can offer to their clients. According to ATB’s website, they have their own online booking tool with web-fares; travel policy compliance tools, built-in trip authorization and travel notifications, and a real-time view of travel spend for travel managers, apart from integration with ERP solutions like SAP and Oracle.

The acquisition of ATB essentially helps Yatra strengthen its position in the more reliable corporate travel business vertical, even as it tries to find its own space in a market that the MakeMyTrip - Goibibo combine dominate. In July 2016, Yatra had signed a reverse-merger agreement with US-based special purpose acquisition company Terrapin 3 Acquisition Corp, which was listed on the NASDAQ, paving the way for a back-door listing of the second Indian online travel services provider in the US.

Yatra was founded in 2006 by former Ebookers Group (UK) executives Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra. Amin is now chief information officer and Chopra is executive vice president of operations. The company is backed by a string of venture capital, private equity and strategic investors. In October last year, it sold a small stake to Reliance Industries Ltd as part of a deal linked to an existing partnership where Reliance pre-installed the Yatra mobile app in its Lyf-branded 4G handsets.

Zee Media Corporation to buy BTVi

Zee Media Corporation is in advanced talks to acquire Business Broadcast News, an Anil Ambani owned company that operates English Business News channel BTVi. Zee Media could pay between Rs 80 crore and Rs 100 crore for the company.

In November last year, Zee Entertainment Enterprises, another Essel Group company, acquired the television broadcast business of Ambani owned Reliance Broadcast Networks (RBN). At the time, Zee Media had picked a 49% stake in Radio business, operated under Big FM umbrella, with an understanding to acquire the remaining 51% after March next year.

While RBN ran entertainment channels Big Magic and Big Ganga, the news channel, BTVi was part of a different company, Business Broadcast News, while Ambani had acquired from former UTV boss Ronnie-Screwvala. English business news is a small genre in the TV space with two strong players: Times Group-owned ET Now and Mukesh Ambani owned CNBC TV18.

After suffering losses for many years, Prannoy Roy's NDTV shut down its English business news channel, NDTV Profit, in June this year. BTVi continues to remain on air. BTVi was launched by Screwvala in April 2008 as UTVi and soon it was renamed Bloomberg UTV, after the company signed a content and licensing deal with American media and data company Bloomberg. In 2012, when Screwvala sold UTV to the Walt Disney group, the Reliance Group acquired Screwvala stake in Business Broadcast News and renamed the channel Bloomberg TV India.

In January last year, Business Broadcast News and Bloomberg decided not to renew the licensing agreement. On August 1 Bloomberg TV India was renamed BTVi. Bloomberg, meanwhile, entered into a joint venture with Raghav Bahl owned Quintillion Media to launch a business new channel, Bloomberg Quint. Bahl is awaiting the broadcast license from the information and broadcasting ministry to launch the channel.

Google acquires Halli Labs

American Technology giant Google has acquired Bangalore based artificial Intelligence firm Halli Labs for an undisclosed sum. The firm becomes the latest AI start up to be snapped by a technology giant after a spate of similar acquisitions by firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple among others.

Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and Machine Learning techniques to old problems and domains. In order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is what they want to do, easier and better. According to research by CB Insights, 34 Artificial Intelligence startups have been acquired in the first quarter of this year, which is double the number compared to the year-ago period.

The study also notes that Google has been the most aggressive in this space with 11 acquisitions since 2012 followed by Apple, Intel and Facebook. Some of the acquisitions by Google in AI include firms such deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto in 2013; British company DeepMind Technologies in 2014 for $600 Million, visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai last year.

It acquired predictive analytics platform Kaggle in the first quarter of this year. Even though India has become the third largest market for start-ups, acquisitions by global technology companies have been few. Some of the notable ones include ZipDial which was acquired by Twitter in January 2015 and LittleEyeLabs that was snapped up by Facebook in January 2014.

Byju buys TutorVista and Edurite

Education Technology start-up Byju has acquired global education company Pearson Plc.’s TutorVista and Edurite for an undisclosed amount, in a move aimed at expanding global reach as well as offerings for students.

TutorVista gets about 70% of the traffic on its website from the US. Pearson in 2009 acquired a 17% stake in Bangalore-headquartered TutorVista and in January 2011 purchased another 59% stake for Rs577 crore. It increased its controlling stake to 80% from 76% in the same year. In February 2013, it acquired the remaining 20%.

TutorVista operates in four business segments-online tutorials; digital content and information and communication technologies for schools; test preparation and offline coaching to students; and the management of K-12 schools. TutorVista had acquired Edurite in 2007. Today, Edurite sells educational CDs and DVDs.

Byju has been one of the few growth stage start-ups to have raised multiple rounds of funds in 2016, apart from food tech start-up Swiggy (Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd). The company raised about $75 million from Sequoia Capital and Belgian family office Sofina in March 2016. In September, Byju raised $50 million in a round led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, becoming the first Asian investment for the personal fund set up by Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. In December, the company raised another $15 million from World Bank arm International Finance Corp.