Uber acquires Mighty AI

Uber has acquired computer vision startup Mighty AI to help advance its technology for self-driving cars.

Mighty AI specializes in computer vision, a field within artificial intelligence that is used to better understand or "label" the surroundings of vehicles that will be deployed autonomously.

Uber, which has become the most important ride-hailing operator, has been moving into new technologies that could see deployment of autonomous vehicles and even flying cars in the coming years. The news comes amid reports that Apple had acquired self-driving tech start-up Drive.ai to advance its own ambitions in the sector.

Dailyhunt acquires Local Play

Bengaluru based news and ebooks mobile app, Dailyhunt has acquired Bengaluru based hyperlocal video content and news content application, Local Play for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2018 by Gunjan Kejriwal and Prajwal P, LocalPlay has done significant process and product innovation for on ground news collection and production. LocalPlay had raised a seed round from Orios Venture Partners, Raveen Sastry, Sanjay Ramakrishnan, Dhimant Parekh, N Ravi Shankar and Gopinath G.

Launched in 2009 by Nokia employees Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, NewsHunt was acquired by Verse in 2012. In August 2015 NewsHunt rebranded itself as DailyHunt. Currently, Dailyhunt has grown into a news and local language content application with over 155 Mn app installs offering 100K news articles in 14 languages licensed from over 800 publication partners every day. The group claims that every month has more than 50 Mn users spend over six billion minutes on the app.

The company has raised more than $122.3 Mn (INR 870 Cr) in series of investments from investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge Capital, Matrix Partners, Omidyar Network, and Darby Overseas Investments. Going forward, Dailyhunt will further scale up and produce 5 Mn pieces of hyperlocal content annually, available exclusively on Dailyhunt.

Hexaware acquires Mobiquity

IT services company Hexaware Technologies Ltd has acquired US-based digital services firm Mobiquity for $182 Million in an all-cash deal. Hexaware is majority owned by private equity firm Baring Private Equity Asia. As of 31 March, Baring owned 62.59% in Hexaware.

With a presence across three continents, Mobiquity is one of the largest independent customer experience consulting firms specializing in creating frictionless multi-channel digital experiences using cloud technologies. Mobiquity creates digital products for well-known global brands such as Amazon Web Services, Rabobank, Philips, Wawa, Backbase and Otsuka.

Hexaware enters an exciting new phase of growth and capability with the acquisition of Mobiquity Inc. Mobiquity strengthens two of our key strategic offerings: Cloudify Everything and Customer Experience Transformation. We are seeing strong demand for these capabilities and, with this acquisition; we will be able to further accelerate our contributions to our customers’ business growth. The transaction involves an upfront payment of $131 million and deferred payouts of $51 million.

Forty-one percent of Hexaware revenue is from BFS (banking and financial services) but there is not much of banking in that. It’s largely capital markets and mortgage. We have a little bit of banking, but it is not core digital banking, which is the most important priority for all banks. Mobiquity is good at that. They have helped the largest bank in the Philippines on this front and are working with one of the largest Middle East banks for their digital banking platform.

Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail acquires Jaypore

Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd which retails brands such as Louis Philippe, Peter England and Van Heusen, has acquired ethnic apparel and lifestyle retailer Jaypore for Rs. 110 crore.

The deal will help ABFRL that also retails men and women’s western wear to tap into the fast-growing ethnic apparel market. Ethnic wear is the largest segment in the Indian fashion apparel market. While ABFRL has built a diversified portfolio of brands across different segments, ethnic wear space is currently under-represented.

Jaypore was set up in 2012. The company started out as an online platform to service the US market. However, the co-founders saw a huge demand coming from the domestic market and Jaypore was launched in India in 2013. The company sells apparel and accessories, and has a presence in both online and offline retail. It has two stores—one each in Delhi and Mumbai—and sells a curated collection of handmade and handcrafted apparel, jewelry and home textiles sourced from across India through its own website. The brand sells to over 60 countries.

ABFRL that also runs the fashion departmental store chain Pantaloons posted a turnover of ₹8,118 cr. in fiscal year 2019. ABFRL runs 2,714 branded stores in 750 cities in India, apart from its brands being retailed across 18,000 multi-brand outlets here.

Salesforce to acquire Tableau

Salesforce.com Inc. decided to buy big data firm Tableau Software Inc. for $15.3 Billion, marking the biggest acquisition in the company’s history as it looks to offer more data insights to it's clients.

Seattle-based Tableau has more than 86,000 customers, including tech heavyweights such as Verizon Communications Inc. and Netflix Inc. As part of the all-stock deal, Tableau shareholders will get 1.103 Salesforce shares, valuing the offer at $177.88 per share, representing a premium of 42% to Tableau's Friday closing price.

Salesforce deal comes days after Alphabet Inc. Google bought big-data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion and surpasses the $5.9 billion that the cloud-based software company paid to buy U.S. software maker MuleSoft in 2018.

Big data analytics is a complex process used to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations; market trends and customer preferences that often help companies make better business decisions. The San Francisco-based company said the deal is likely to add up to $400 million in its 2020 revenue, but would decrease adjusted profit by about 37 cents to 39 cents per share.

Manipal Group acquires Jigsaw Academy

Manipal Education & Medical Group has acquired Jigsaw Academy, online analytics and big data trainer for professionals and students. Manipal ProLearn, part of Manipal Global Education Services Pvt. Ltd, offers certification courses across technology, digital marketing, data sciences, project management and finance.

The acquisition will help MEMG streamline its digital marketing spends and offer a larger set of course offerings to its clients for reskilling and upskilling. Founded in 2011, Bengaluru-based Jigsaw Academy raised $3 million from Manipal Global Education Services in 2015. The company claims to have more than 50,000 learners across more than 30 countries. In 2017, Jigsaw Academy and the University of Chicago launched a data science and machine learning program.

Upgrading skills is increasingly becoming important for professionals, particularly in technology, fuelling demand for such courses. “Things are changing fast in technology. If one is not able to keep pace, there is a real fear of becoming obsolete like a phone or computer.

MEGM estimates the online reskilling and upskilling market at nearly ₹730,000 crore. There are several start-ups in the space, including the likes of Udacity, Coursera and upgrade, which are estimated to be growing over 40% year-on-year, according to media reports.

Go-Jek acquires AirCTO

Indonesia based ride-hailing startup Go-Jek announced its acquisition of Bengaluru based AirCTO, an artificial intelligence based recruitment platform for an undisclosed amount.

Go-Jek will use the acquisition to open its second engineering and product development centre in Gurgaon. As part of the deal, the AirCTO team will join Go-Jek with immediate effect and will look at building products that accelerate recruitments for Go-Jek. The company has also announced the opening of a new office in Gurgaon, for which Go-Jek plans to hire 100 employees aiming to reach a headcount of 500 in India by the year-end.

Other expansion plans include more acquisitions in India, with Go-Jek actively exploring the start-up space, particularly entities with expertise in engineering, design and product management. Go-Jek currently runs one of the largest JRuby, Clojure, Java and Go clusters in Asia. Its robust tech-infrastructure is built and managed by over 350 engineers, who manage operations across Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Indonesian company offers on-demand ordering of food, last-mile commuting, digital payments, shopping, hyper-local delivery, grocery delivery, and two dozen services on its super app. The app was first launched in January 2015 for consumers in Indonesia. Go-Jek now operates in 204 cities and regions in five Southeast Asian countries.

Google to acquire big data analytics company Looker

Google has announced plans to acquire data analytics platform Looker in a $2.6 Billion all-cash transaction. The deal is expected to close later this year, at which point Looker will become part of Google Cloud, helping serve Google customers a more “comprehensive analytics solution.

This move is consistent with Google’s recent multi-cloud strategy shift, which has included the launch of Anthos, a rebranded Google Cloud Services platform that plays nice with AWS and Azure. “Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making. The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation.

Founded in 2011, Looker is one of a number of platforms helping companies visualize and make sense of their vast pools of data by tapping myriad sources, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and MySQL. Looker had raised nearly $300 million since its inception, including an $81.5 million series D round of funding back in 2017 that was led by none other than Capital G — the investment unit of Google parent company Alphabet. Given the duo’s existing cloud partnership shared customers, and investment affiliations, today’s news shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.

This is a huge deal for Google Cloud, easily topping the $625 million it paid for Apigee in 2016. It marks the first major deal in the Kurian era as Google tries to beef up its market share. While the two companies share common customers, the addition of Looker should bring a net gain that could help them upsell to other parts of the Looker customer base.

Foursquare buys Placed from Snap Inc.

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc. on the heels of a fresh $150 Million investment led by The Raine Group. Placed is the biggest competitor to foursquare attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact of a digital campaign or ad. Up until now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare combined have measured more than $3 Billion in ad-to-store visits.

Placed launched in 2011 and raised $13.4 million before being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017. As part of the deal with Foursquare, the company’s Attribution product will henceforth be known as Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition also means that Placed powered by Foursquare will have more than 450 measurable media partners, including Twitter, Snap, Pandora and Waze. Moreover, more than 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are partnered with Placed or Foursquare.

It’s also worth noting that this latest investment of $150 million is the biggest financing round for Foursquare ever, and comes following a $33 million Series F last year. That last bit, about an independent location technology platform, is important here. Foursquare is 10 years old and has transformed from a consumer-facing location check-in app — a game, really — into location analytics and development platform.

The Pilgrim SDK fits into that top item on the list: developer tools. The Pilgrim SDK allows developers to embed location-smart experiences and notifications into their apps and services. But it also expands Foursquare’s access to data from beyond its own apps to the greater ecosystem, yielding the data it needs to power analytics tools for brands and publishers. With this acquisition, Placed will be able to leverage Foursquare’s existing map of 105 million places of interest across 190 countries, as well as tap into the measured U.S. audience of more than 100 million monthly devices.