Amazon acquires online pharmacy PillPack

Amazon is buying online Pharmacy PillPack – a move that could disrupt the drug store business. PillPack has pharmacy licenses in all 50 states. The company delivers medications to customers in pre-sorted doses designed to make it easier for people to take multiple medications a day.

Although brick-and-mortar stores might feel the effects of Amazon's competition, the biggest battles will likely be fought by the mail-order pharmacies, which generally serve patients with chronic conditions such as heart disease that may require drugs to control blood pressure, cholesterol and other problems.

Some of the largest mail order pharmacies are controlled by pharmacy benefit managers such as Express Scripts (ESRX.O) and CVS, which offer financial and other incentives to patients to fill their prescriptions with them. PillPack holds pharmacy licenses in all 50 states and is authorized to deliver in 49 states and is an in-network pharmacy for major Medicare Part D plans.

For consumers, it could be good news if the deal nudges the pharmacy sector into a heated competition for customers, potentially driving down drug prices. Prescription drug spending tops $450 billion annually. Amazon's acquisition of PillPack marks another development in the company's rivalry with Walmart, which had been rumored to be weighing an acquisition of PillPack.

Times Internet buys video app MX Player

Times Internet Ltd, the digital business arm of media conglomerate Times Group, is planning to foray into video streaming with the acquisition of South Korea based video platform MX player for Rs 1,000 crore.

The deal marks the biggest acquisition till date by Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd (BCCL), Times Internet’s parent firm, as a group and reflects its bullish outlook on the digital space. BCCL’s earlier big-ticket overseas acquisition – radio network Virgin Radio in 2008.

The platform will house premium and exclusive content from leading content producers and publishers around the world, which means it, will compete with the likes of Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar and Netflix. MX Player claims that its app, which houses a basic video player, has been installed on 500 million devices worldwide. The video player will continue to support the offline video playback features that are currently available.

MX Player is investing in premium, original, digital-first content, with an emphasis on Hindi and regional production. In its first year, the platform will launch with more than 20 original shows, and over 50,000 hours of premium content across all languages.

Symphony to buy Climate Technologies

Symphony Ltd, one of the country’s leading air cooler manufacturers announced to acquire Australia’s Climate Technologies Pvt Ltd. The Ahmedabad-based company has signed an agreement to buy 95% equity stake in Climate Technologies, Australia’s leading manufacturer of cooling and heating appliances.

Climate Technologies, headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, manufactures and sells evaporative air coolers, ducted gas heaters and other cooling products in Australia and the US. With iconic brands such as Bonaire and Celair, Climate Technologies is one of Australia’s most recognized manufacturers and suppliers of cooling and heating appliances.

It also has a presence in the US markets and has a manufacturing facility in Salisbury, South Australia, with an assembly operation in Las Vegas, Nevada. The acquisition would help Symphony expand its international footprint and would provide it an opportunity of lowering the business risk because of different weather conditions prevailing in India and Australia.

This is an exciting opportunity for Symphony as Climate Technologies is a very strong strategic fit. This acquisition will provide Symphony access to new geographies such as Australia and a strong position in the US, which is the largest air cooler market in the world.

PayPal to buy Simility

Digital Payments platform PayPal Holdings Inc. signed a deal to acquire Palo Alto based Simility Inc., fraud prevention and risk management platform, for $120 Million in cash. The acquisition will allow PayPal to roll out new fraud prevention features to merchants.

Features such as fraudulent payment activity prevention, risk management and transaction verification will soon be introduced on the merchant’s online dashboard. PayPal has been at the forefront of developing innovative fraud prevention and risk management solutions for nearly 20 years and now merchants will be able to configure those solutions to manage the unique complexities of their businesses.

Simility, which was founded in 2014, has raised more than $20 million till date from Accel Partners and California-based investors, including Trinity Ventures and The Valley Fund. It caters to clients in banking and financial services, online marketplaces and classifieds, payment services providers, and e-commerce among others.

PayPal, which had launched its domestic operations in India in November 2017, offers payments products to both consumers and businesses. It also made an investment in Noida-based digital retail payment platform Pine Labs in May this year in a $125 million round.

Cleartrip acquires Flyin

Online Travel agency Cleartrip Pvt. Ltd has acquired Saudi Arabian Travel start-up Flyin for an undisclosed amount.

This is Cleartrip first cross-border acquisition and the Mumbai-based company is looking to step up operations in West Asia’s travel market, which has witnessed the entry of a dozen domestic and international budget operators such as FlyDubai, AirArabia, Pegasus Airlines and others. The company claimed that the combined entity of Cleartrip and Flyin will have a market share of over 60% in West Asia.

Saudi-based Flyin, which was founded in 2008, currently offers bus and flight ticketing and several holiday packages on its online portal. It claims to aggregate more than 320,000 hotels and 450 airlines on its platform. Cleartrip, on the other hand, was founded in 2006, and has been in West Asia for the past five years. It offers air, hotel and stays accommodation, and also aggregates local experiences on its portal.

Cleartrip claims to sell over 10 million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights annually. Cleartrip last raised an undisclosed round of funding from its existing investors Concur Technologies and Gund Investment, among others in June 2016. In India, online travel is largely led by players such as Cleartrip, Yatra and MakeMyTrip, which merged with Goibibo in 2016.

Paytm buys Cube26

One97 Communications Ltd which owns payments app Paytm announced the acquisition of New Delhi based technology startup Cube26. The acquisition will help the company upgrade user experience over its mobile platform.

Cube26 develops customized Android OS for original equipment manufacturers, and it is currently building a games and apps store by connecting India-based developers directly with smartphone users. The app store also helps developers monetize their content.

Cube26 is backed by Tiger Global Management and Flipkart. It had raised $7.7 million from both investors in 2015. The start-up was founded in 2012. The acquisition comes just days after Paytm claimed to have 120 million monthly active users on its in-app messaging feature called ‘Paytm Inbox’. The company also said that it will focus more on regional content for making its app more popular across small cities and towns.

Paytm had also made two acquisitions in recent months. In December 2017, Paytm acquired Nearbuy and Little, two platforms that focus on local restaurants and commercial establishments. Paytm later merged both entities and made an undisclosed investment into the resultant entity.

Truecaller acquires Chillr

Sweden’s Truecaller started out life as a service that screen calls and messages to weed out spammers. In recent time the company has switched its focus to India, its largest market based on users, adding services that include payments to make it more useful. Now Truecaller is putting even more weight behind its India push after it announced its first acquisition, mobile payment service Chillr.

The vision is to go deeper into mobile payments and associated services to turn Truecaller into a utility that goes beyond just handling messages and calls, particularly payments — a space that WhatsApp is preparing to enter in India. Truecaller doesn’t have WhatsApp - like scale — few companies can match 200 million active users in India, but it did recently disclose that it has 100 million daily active users worldwide, while India is its largest country with 150 million registered users.

Truecaller has raised over $90 million from investors to date. Truecaller has instead raised capital from Swedish investment firm Zenith. Chillr, which offer payment services between over 50 banks, had raised $7.5 million from the likes of Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The development of the service in India has made it look from the outside that the company is splitting into two, a product localized for India and another for the rest of the world.

Outbrain acquires AdNgin

Outbrain, the world’s leading native advertising platform, has acquired AdNgin, a UI Optimization company built to enhance the reader experience. This acquisition is Outbrain’s sixth to date, continuing a string of growth-driven accelerations in the last several years.

Guiding digital discoveries of readers around the globe, Outbrain connects publishers, marketers and consumers through personalized, interest-based recommendations. AdNgin focuses on that same level of personalization, individually optimizing the reader experience based on their visual preferences.

The understanding that every consumer is different — from their personal interests to the way they interact digitally — is what inspired the two companies to come together. Harnessing the combined technologies, performance will continually scale as publishers see higher RPMs (revenue per mile), marketers higher CTRs (click through rate), and readers better overall content interactions.

Microsoft to buy GitHub

Microsoft Corp. reached an agreement to buy GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, for $7.5 Billion in stock. Microsoft expects the deal to close by the end of 2018.

The acquisition provides a way forward for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying for nine months to find a new chief executive officer and has yet to make a profit from its popular service that allows coders to share and collaborate on their work. It also helps Microsoft, which is increasingly relying on open-source software, to add programming tools and tie up with a company that has become a key part of the way Microsoft writes its own software.

San Francisco-based GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, use it to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It’s also a social network of sorts for developers. Still, GitHub’s losses have been significant -- it lost $66 million over three quarters in 2016. The company had revenue of $98 million in nine months of 2016.

Microsoft has talked to GitHub, which hosts more than 28 million software developers working on 80 million repositories of code, on and off for a few years. Recently they began talks about a partnership but progressed to discussing an acquisition, according to another person familiar with the situation. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015, making today’s deal a win for GitHub backers like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.