Tuesday, 28 August 2018

Amazon Pay to acquire Tapzo

Amazon India Payment arm, Amazon Pay, has acquired Bengaluru based and Sequoia backed startup Tapzo, as the e-commerce giant attempts to aggressively ramp up its payments business and get a bigger slice of India’s booming digital payments economy, currently dominated by the likes of Paytm.

Prior to its acquisition, Tapzo counted the likes of Sequoia Capital and American Express Co. among its investors, and had raised over $20 million since it started out in 2009. In its current avatar, Tapzo allows users to access over 35 apps, including the likes of Flipkart, Amazon, Uber and Ola, among others.
Founded in 2009 as a complaint redressal forum called Akosha, the service was rebranded and launched as Helpchat. Helpchat started out as a personal assistant platform with a chatting feature, but even that pivot proved unsuccessful for Singla and the rest of his team. Eventually, Helpchat was pivoted and re-launched as an all-in-one platform, Tapzo, in November 2016.

Amazon separately launched a new bill payments service, which will enable prepaid and postpaid bill payments through its Amazon Pay wallet. As part of the new service, Amazon has forged tie-ups with hundreds of billers for electricity, mobile and broadband bill payments, among others.

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