Craftsvilla acquires PlaceofOrigin

Sequoia backed Craftsvilla Handicrafts Pvt. Ltd had ventured into the food segment with the acquisition of Bengaluru based food startup PlaceofOrigin in an all-stock deal. PlaceofOrigin was founded by two former bankers in 2014. The company curates and takes to the market producers of ethnic Indian food items and local specialties across categories such as sweets, snacks, staples and health foods.

It currently claims to have vendors and customers across 20 states of India. The 15 member team of the company will be joining Craftsvilla after the acquisition. Craftsvilla vision is to build a one-stop destination for consumers looking for ethnic products. PlaceofOrigin has been working in this category for the last two years and has been able to bring a lot of regional varieties online and address key logistical challenges in this space.

Craftsvilla raised $34 Million in a funding round led by existing investors Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners in November. Its previous funding was in January 2015 when it received $18 Million in an investment round led by sequoia. In December, it announced it had set aside $10 Million to acquire three to five companies across different sectors. This year, it acquired Mumbai based logistics startup Sendd.

Freshdesk acquires Framebench

Cloud based customer support software firm Freshdesk has acquired Pune based Framebench, an online multimedia file collaboration platform, for an undisclosed amount. This is the fourth acquisition by Freshdesk, starting from the first acquisition of live video chat firm 1CLICK.io in August 2015.

Framebench offers an online platform that enables teams to share, review and comment on videos, images, presentations and documents. With the acquisition of Framebench, support agents can interact with their customers and internal product teams by collaborating on the same file. Framebench, launched in 2013, is funded by Blume ventures and has offered its services to the US Republican Party in its election campaign.

With Framebench, the customer support agent can interact with the product team even as the customer sends a screenshot and use the visual communication platform in realtime while working on knowledge base articles, images or even tutorial videos. This would enable multiple individuals to edit, annotate and review creative files.

Launched in 2010, Freshdesk has 50,000 customers around the world, including 3M, Honda, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, the Atlantic, and Petronas. The flagship product allows organizations to support customers through email, phone, websites, mobile apps, forums and social media.

Crossroads acquires MeriCAR.com

Roadside assistance services firm Crossroads India has acquired the country’s first online car garage aggregator MeriCAR.com to expand its network across the country. Post-acquisition, Crossroads will surpass 1,000 branded garages across the country. It aims to grow this number to over 5,000 in the next two years.

With MeriCAR.com on board, the company would be able to hasten its garage aggregation process, which is seen as a key growth driver going forward. As part of the deal, MeriCAR.com founder Rakesh Sidana will be joining Crossroads and will head a newly created vertical points of sales and services (POSS) network.

Established in 2008 as listing model, MeriCAR created a unique value proposition for helping car owners for repairing and car servicing. It is expanding its reach across the country by offering services through its digital platform, apart from its traditional road side assistance (RSA) brick and mortar model.

The company has recently expanded its retail sales teams to energize operations in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, West Bengal, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Odisha, and Rajasthan. The city based firm started operations 16 years ago in 1999 and today has B2C operations in 12 cities and network presence in 30 cities across the country.

IBM to acquire Truven Health Analytics

IBM announced its intent to buy Truven Health Analytics for a whopping $2.6 Million. It is the fourth major purchase for Watson health since the unit was established in 2014. Watson Health was formed when IBM purchased Phytel and Explorys in April 2014. Both companies had the common denominator of being data driven health companies.

The unit added Merge Healthcare for another billion dollars last August to give the company access to a huge store of imaging data. With this purchase, IBM gets access to Truven Cloud based data repository, 2500 employees and 8500 clients, including US Federal and state government agencies, employers, health plans, hospitals, clinicians, and life science companies.

The Truven data will be integrated with Watson data, used to identify health cost savings, improve healthcare outcomes, fight fraud and make operations more efficient. With this acquisition, IBM will be world’s leading health data, analytics and insights company. Truven was previously acquired by Veritas Capital Management Fund LLC from Thomson Reuters Corp for $1.25 Billion in 2012.  

Vidooly acquires iCouchApp

Noida based video analytics startup, Vidooly has acquired over the top (OTT) content company iCouchApp, also from Noida, for an undisclosed amount. As part the deal, all the assets and intellectual property of iCouchApp, including its technology that powers mobile apps of TV giants like Zee TV and History TV18, will come into Vidooly fold.

The iCouchApp technology allows consumers to discover new videos, interact with TV shows and keep track of their favorite shows, at the same allowing media companies to create and maintain their own OTT app. iCouchApp was serving 1.5 Million monthly active users on its platform. The iCouchApp expertise in the OTT segment will allow Vidooly to provide actionable data across VOD (video on Demand) platforms and embrace the trend of mainstream TV going online.

Founded in November 2014, Vidooly had in June 2015 raised $1 Million from Silicon Valley based Bessemer Venture Partners. Vidooly has so far added over 5,000 individual YouTube channels and 15 multi-channel networks across the globe to its list of customers using its dashboard. Nearly 120,000 videos are uploaded every month through Vidooly network while its big data engine analysis over 500 million monthly video through its platform.

Housejoy buys fitness startup Orobind

Amazon backed home services provider, Housejoy, has acquired Orobind, an at-home personal fitness startup, in an all-stock deal as it looks to grow its presence in the fast growing health and wellness space.

The acquisition of Orobind is the second such deal Housejoy is closing in less than a month’s time, spurred by the $23 Million funding round the company closed in December which was led by Amazon. While the exact terms of the deal have not been disclosed, most of the team at Orobind will join Housejoy.

Orobind, which currently operates exclusively in Bengaluru, has over 1000 customers and 135 active fitness trainers on its platform. The acquisition will help Housejoy scale its own personal fitness business which it currently offers in 5 cities across India with 5,000 subscribers. Fitness and wellness is a highly lucrative category for most of the home services players primarily because of high repeat rates and high customer lifetime, value but to leverage it one must have a highly differentiated product.

Rather than looking to expand its offerings to more cities in the country, Housejoy plans to consolidate its business and dwell deeper into each business vertical in each of the cities it’s already present in. The company currently aggregates service providers for pest control, drivers, beauty, electronic repairs etc. and is building its own presence in high-demand categories such as fitness, beauty and laundry.

Amazon to buy Emvantage Payments

Online marketplace Amazon said it will buy online payments firm Emvantage Payments Pvt. Ltd. to develop India specific payments solution. The announcement comes shortly after Amazon infused an additional Rs. 1696 crore into its India Unit (Amazon Seller Services Pvt. Ltd) in December 2015, to take on local rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal.

Large e-commerce companies have made significant investments, acquisitions and partnerships with payment companies to claim a share of the fast growing digital payments vertical which helps reduce the dependency on cash and make it convenient for online shopping. The Indian e-commerce market is estimated to grow to $100 Million by April 2020. Emvantage employees will join Amazon payments team.

Jasper Info Tech Pvt. Ltd. run online marketplace Snapdeal launched its mobile wallet through its utility payments unit FreeCharge in September 2015. The company had set aside Rs. 1000 crore towards cash back offers and discounts among other initiatives to attract more consumers to FreeCharge Digital Wallet. Snapdeal had acquired FreeCharge for $450 Million in April 2015.

Flipkart had acquired payments services company FX Mart Pvt. Ltd. in August 2015. ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd. cab aggregator Ola had made its Ola Money digital wallet Available for making payments in other e-commerce platforms. 

Next Education acquires InOpen Technologies

Hyderabad based Next Education has acquired Indian Institute of Technology; Bombay incubated startup InOpen Technologies for its K-12 computer science product Computer Masti. Computer Masti was created jointly by IIT-B and InOpen and has a series of e-books to teach computer science in schools.

This acquisition will scale Computer Masti and approximately three Million students will use CS 101 (basics of Computer science and programming) by July 2017. Computer Masti is a core computer science curriculum. It focuses on building life skills through computer science by emphasizing underlying concepts and not merely software specific skills.

After the acquisition, InOpen Technologies employees will move to Next Education. InOpen started with a seed capital of Rs 25 Lakh and got a boost when State Bank of India lent Rs 50 Lakh without any collateral in August 2010, while venture capital fund VenturEast invested $500,000 later. Founded in 2007, Next Education has catered to more than seven million students studying in their 7000-plus partner schools.

Wipro to buy HealthPlan Services

Wipro Ltd has agreed to buy HealthPlan services, a Florida, US based company that caters to the health insurance sector for $460 Million. This is the third buyout by India’s third largest software services exported in less than three months.

Earlier in December, Wipro spent $78 Million to buy Cellent, a German Technology Company that implements and maintains SAP (Systems Applications and Products) software for clients in automobile and manufacturing segments. Later, it bought a securities processing and fund administration services provider Viteos Group for $130 Million as the company looks to expand its portfolio of services to financial companies.

Both HealthcarePlan services and Viteos Group offer solutions over cloud computing platforms or what is called as Business process as a service. The partnership with HealthPlan services positions Wipro to participate in the shift of the US Health insurance industry towards a customer centric business model.

HealthPlan services strengthen Wipro position in the health insurance exchange market while offering synergies with Wipro presence in the Managed Medicare and commercial group insurance markets. This is Wipro fourth acquisition in last 12 months. 

Lycos Internet to acquire TriTelA Gmbh

Digital Marketing Firm Lycos Internet Ltd will acquire 100% stake in Austria based mobile solutions provider TriTelA Gmbh in an all-stock transaction giving it access to cloud based technology that can help broaden its consumer services.

The deal will give Lycos access to TriTelA ‘mysms’ messenger that synchronizes test messages (SMS) and instant messages across different devices (mobile phones, tablets and desktops) through a cloud based account MySMS, available on Android Play and Apple store, has 3 million users worldwide and synchronizes 100 Million messages a day.

MySMS cloud based framework can tie multiple nodes such as SMS, instant messaging, wearable technology, connected ear and smart appliances with the consumer through multiple devices, smartphones, tablets, laptops and over-the-top (OTT) content. Lycos owns community and social sites in 120 languages in 177 countries including search engine Lycos.com. Last year, it launched two fitness bands under its newly launched Internet of Things based division called Lycos Life.

In the instant messenger space, it competes with the likes of Whatsapp, WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, and Facebook Messenger that have millions of users. Lycos will also get to own two other assets of TriTelA as a result of this acquisition. SPH Wien is a content management and analytics platform for Video. Kika Social is a unified platform for social media listening, engagement and measurement. 

Housejoy acquires MyWash

Home services startup Housejoy has acquired online laundry services player MyWash in a deal underlining further consolidation in the nascent home services market, where venture capital funding has started drying up. The deal would give Amazon backed Housejoy a foothold in a strategic category to help drive repeat customer usage.

MyWash was founded in 2014 by BITS Pilani alumni along with Anna University graduates. Housejoy will now take care of client laundry and dry cleaning, with pickup and delivery right at consumer doorstep. The entire MyWash core team will be joining Housejoy and operate from their office. The company is looking to scale 10,000 services per day over the next year for the laundry vertical.

Housejoy had started laundry services in-house six month ago. The average size of orders that Housejoy get for laundry services is in the range of Rs 400 and for home services it is around 500 bookings a day. The company operates in 11 cities in India but the laundry services will be focused only in three cities at first I.e. in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

The laundry vertical is expected to contribute around 10 percent to the company turnover. The company has had an average growth of 10-15 percent month on month. Launched in January 2015, Housejoy provides an aggregation of services to customers ranging from maintenance and home repairs to plumbing, electrical services, home cleaning and computer repairs. It also offers specialized services in beauty and in house bridal make up and are expanding their service portfolio. 

Microsoft buys SwiftKey

Microsoft had acquired British based software keyboard maker SwiftKey and it would be integrated with the tech giant “intelligent systems” for mobile devices. SwiftKey makes keyboard apps which are used on some 300 million Android and Apple devices, replacing the default interfaces with a more efficient one.

SwiftKey, which uses artificial intelligence to help make keystrokes more intuitive and efficient, expands Microsoft efforts in the domain. SwiftKey estimates that its users have saved nearly 10 trillion keystrokes, across 100 languages, saving more than 100,000 years in combined typing time. Microsoft would continue to make the service available on all platforms not just those operated by Microsoft.

SwiftKey for most smartphone users comes through as just another third party keyboard app, an upgrade on the default keyboard that most platforms offer. But beyond the app and its user interface, what the company offers, and something that makes it attractive for the likes of Microsoft, is the very technology that powers the app, artificial Intelligence or AI. Its predictive technology learns from the user’s personal writing style, on the basis of previous usage of text, chat messages or social media interactions, and predicts the next word or phrase that the user intends to type. 

CraftsVilla Acquires Sendd

CraftsVilla, an online marketplace for Indian products, has acquired the on-demand shipping service provider Sendd for $4.5 Million. Post-acquisition, Sendd will continue to operate independently and offer its services to other firms as well. CraftsVilla will use the acquisition to strengthen its logistics capabilities.

Founded in April last year, Sendd allows businesses to send parcels to 20,000 pin codes across India. It provides packaging, branding and insurance policies for parcels and provides an API for partner integration. The company also claims to provide reverse pickups and international shipments across all countries.

CraftsVilla was founded in 2011. It takes a 20% commission on the products sold; however, it is not clear if the company does this on per item or per order, which might include many items. The company claims to have 25,000 sellers on its platform, along with 3.5 Million sold products. In November last year, CraftsVilla raised Series C funding worth $33.3 Million after the company raised Series B funding worth $18 Million in April the same year.

Last year saw a consolidation in logistics services with various companies getting acquired or invested in by business customers or competitors. Flipkart acquired strategic minority stake in MapmyIndia to pad its supply chain and logistics operations. Grofers had acquired Townrush. Snapdeal invested in GoJavas.