Wings Travels acquires Bookmycab

Pune based Wings Travels wingstravel.in Management Pvt. Ltd, which provides staff transportation services, has acquired taxi services company Bookmycab for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will help Wings Travels expend into the radio taxi segment and strengthen its technological capabilities.

The merged entity will be rebranded as WingsTravels Bookmycab. It will be run by Mumbai based LiveMinds Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which owns Bookmycab. Wings Travels, which has been operating since 2001, primarily offered staff transports services to business process outsourcing firms. It has about 600 employees and offers its services in Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Nagpur, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad.

The acquisition will help Wings Travels to expand its services to 47 cities in India and offer its radio taxi services in Yangon (Myanmar), Chiang Mai (Thailand) and Vietnam. While its Yangon operations commenced about three months ago, the Thailand operations are likely to start from the first week of May. 

Ola acquires Qarth

Taxi hailing service Ola, run by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd, has acquired Mobile payments company, Qarth in an attempt to strengthen its mobile wallet service Ola Money launched in November last year. Qarth, which runs a mobile payments app called X-Pay, is Ola second investment in the payment space.

The move comes at a time when e-commerce leaders such as Flipkart Ltd and Snapdeal are strengthening their payment business through acquisitions. Flipkart acquired a majority stake in payment services startup FX Mart Pvt. Ltd in September last year, while Snapdeal acquired utility payment service company Freecharge for $400 Million in March last year, in the biggest ever consumer Internet deal in India.

Ola Money cannot only be used to make payments for Ola rides, but also for other online platforms such as Online eyewear store Lenskart, hotel aggregator Oyo Rooms, music streaming app Saavn and hyperlocal electronics retailer such as Zopper. Such services throws open an additional revenue stream for Ola, with the ride hailing service still being loss making, and also puts the service in direct competition with bigger rivals such as Paytm and Freecharge.

Ola, which launched food and grocery delivery services last year, shuttered both verticals earlier this month to focus on its core offering of transportation. The move came amid growing competition from Uber, which claims about 50% of the Indian Market. The two companies have rolled out services such as ride sharing, carpooling and even bike taxis and have been slashing fares in an attempt to acquire customers. 

Tableau acquires HyPer

Tableau software has acquired HyPer, a high performance database system company. As part of the technology acquisition, Tableau will add key technical personnel and plans to establish a research and development center in Munich and expand its research into high performance computing. Tableau intends to incorporate the technology into its product set.

Tableau is business intelligence and Analytics Company, taking business data and helping companies make sense of it. The new HyPer database technology should provide a performance boost across Tableau products, Patrice Pelland. Among the capabilities, HyPer brings to Tableau include faster data analysis, regardless of the size of the data set, unifying the transactional and analysis systems, richer analytics capabilities and support for structured or semi-structured data, which is increasingly important when processing Big Data sets.

HyPer is a fast main-memory database system designed for simultaneous OLTP and OLAP processing. It also unifies transactions and analysis in a single system, and when coupled with Tableau will help customers take visual analytics closer to the transactional systems that underlie most business. HyPer grew out of a research project started in 2010 by professors in Munich. 

Shopclues to buy Mobile Payments start-up Momoe

Online shopping platform Shopclues.com is in advanced talks to buy mobile payments firm Momoe Technologies, as it looks to add a payment service to its platform. The all-stock deal, could value Bengaluru based Momoe at anywhere between $8 Million and $15 Million.

Shopclues was looking to invest close to $50 Million in either buying stakes or acquiring start-ups in the Hyperlocal, ad-tech and internet payments domains in order to accelerate expansion in India’s fast growing e-commerce market. Shopclues will use Momoe Technology to strengthen its payment network for merchants on its platform and will further integrate it with its hyperlocal commerce business.

During the past 12-18 months, large e-commerce firms have made investments, acquisitions and partnerships with payments companies to claim a share of the digital payments vertical, which helps reduce the dependency on cash and makes it convenient for online shopping. In February, Amazon announced acquisition of online payments firm Emvantage Payments Pvt. Ltd.

Snapdeal acquired mobile wallet firm FreeCharge in April 2015, and Flipkart bought payments services company FX Mart Pvt. Ltd in August 2015. Momoe was founded in 2014. The company primarily provides payment solutions for offline merchants. It allows customers to make digital payments using the Momoe app on their mobile phones. Momoe rose close to $1.2 Million from IDG Ventures India, Jungle Ventures and India Quotient. India’s e-commerce market is estimated to touch $100 Billion by April 2020.

Innerchef acquires EatOnGo and Flavour Labs

Food technology start-up Innerchef, which operates in the ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat meals segment has acqui-hired two food startups, Flavour Labs in Gurgaon and EatOnGo in Bengaluru, signaling further consolidation in the food tech segment starved of cash after investors clawed back on investments late last year.

Acqui-hiring is essentially done for the target company talent pool more than its products and services. The acquisition of Flavour Labs, a food truck company, will help Innerchef enter the mobile kitchen segment, while EatOnGo, which specializes in breakfasts, will help the company expand its presence in Bengaluru. EatOnGo was launched in May 2015 while Flavour Labs started its operations in 2014.

In September last year, Innerchef had raised Rs. 11 Crore in a pre-series A funding round from a clutch of investors including redBus and Paytm founders. Apart from ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat meals, Innerchef operates a Hyperlocal marketplace for desserts sourced from home bakers and bakeries in Delhi, Gurgaon and Bengaluru.

Several food tech start-ups have shut shop following a slowdown in investment while some have been acquired by well capitalized rivals. While Internet first kitchen SpoonJoy was bought by Hyperlocal delivery startup Grofers, another startup Dazo shut shop the same month. Bigger Businesses such as Zomato and TinyOwl have pruned their workforce last year.

Times Internet to acquire Willow TV

Times Internet Ltd, the digital arm of the Times Group, had reached a definitive agreement to acquire Willow TV International, a leading cricket broadcaster in US. Willow is one of the fastest growing sports network in the US, featuring popular cricket matches and events. TIL, has committed $100 Million to the purchase of Willow as its primary investment into the business, namely right acquisitions and marketing.

Named after the English willow tree from which crickets bats are made, Willow is the only channel in the US that is dedicated to cricket. The television channel has an aligned digital service at www.willow.tv. Both the TV channel and its digital service are widely distributed by satellite, cable, Internet Protocol Television and OTT platform in the US.

TIL, the digital network of Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd, owns and operates media and technology assets across news, music, and sports, and claims to reach more than 140 Million users each month. For TIL, Willow complements the existing audience of cricbuzz.com, a property that the company acquired in November 2014. Last year, during the ICC World Cup 2015, cricbuzz saw more than one billion visits in a span of 40 days with 96% of these on mobile.

Cricket is one of the fastest growing sports in the US, and the second most popular sport in the world behind soccer. In the last few years, cricket popularity has increased with the addition of the newer shorter Twenty20 format. Willow will provide a live US television broadcast and live streaming of the ICC World Twenty20 the world’s premier Twenty20 cricket tournament.