Groupon acquires Presence AI

Groupon today announced it has acquired Presence AI – an AI-powered text and voice communications tool that enables and facilitates messaging between customers and merchants.

Consumers––especially millennials––vastly prefer messaging and chat-based communications over phone calls. Presence AI enables merchants to answer to that trend by offering a 24/7 business assistant that integrates with a merchant’s existing scheduling software––or replace pen and paper––to accept and manage bookings, provide instant answers to customer questions, remind people when it’s time to re-book and much more.

Groupon increased bookable inventory 12 percent year over year and booked tens of millions of diners, concert-goers, spa visitors and more in 2018. As the company transitions towards the universal book ability for certain services, Presence AI’s technology will provide merchants with the capabilities to support this booking vision.

Presence AI was founded in 2015 in San Francisco and operates in the health, beauty and wellness space, which is one of Groupon’s largest categories. The company already has a number of key integrations with popular booking software providers. Presence AI was backed by the Amazon Alexa Fund and participated in the 2018 Alexa Accelerator, powered by TechStars, which supports early-stage start-ups using voice to deliver transformative customer and business experiences.

Paytm to acquire Nearbuy and Little

Paytm, operated by One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd, is in advanced talks to acquire two deals platforms, Nearbuy and Little. The acquisitions of Nearbuy (formerly Groupon India) and Little Internet Pvt. Ltd, both of which offer discount deals at restaurants, salons and commercial establishments, will allow Paytm to boost its presence in the hyperlocal space.

In the past two years, Paytm has been in a hyper-expansion mode. From being a digital payments platform, the Alibaba-backed firm lets user’s book movies, make reservations for hotels and travel. Separately, Paytm’s e-commerce venture Paytm Mall is scaling up rapidly to take on Flipkart and Amazon. Last month, Paytm acquired a majority stake in ticketing platform Insider.in to allow events on Insider.in to show up on Paytm.

Gurugram-headquartered Nearbuy, which broke away from its NASDAQ-listed parent Groupon Inc. in 2015, was scouting for fresh equity. Groupon Inc. had sold some of its majority stake in Nearbuy to Sequoia India—which spent $20 million for the acquisition—as part of an organizational re-shuffle. The firm was subsequently re-branded Nearbuy. In 2016, the firm raised $2.2 million in debt from Blacksoil Capital. But both Nearbuy and its rival Little struggled to expand.

In July 2015, deals discovery app Little, which was started by the founders of fashion label Zovi, raised $50 million from Paytm, SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management. It then set a target of generating annualized gross sales of $170 million but missed it by a big margin. SAIF Partners is also a large minority investor in Paytm. Paytm, which launched its payments bank in May, raised a mammoth $1.4 billion in equity infusion from SoftBank Group Corp. in the same month. The round valued One97 Communications at $7 billion.

Flipkart acquires Appiterate

E-commerce major Flipkart has been very clear about its mobile only strategy and in order to strengthen its presence in the area of mobile technology, it has acquired a New-Delhi based mobile engagement and marketing automation company Appiterate. This is Flipkart third acquisition of this year.

Appiterate helps E-commerce companies target customers better through push notifications and in-app messages. The funding team has a strong experience in the mobile app space and has in the past built mobile apps for companies such as Microsoft, Zomato, Groupon, Sears etc. In a short span Appiterate has carved out a niche in the industry as being one of the most disruptive companies in its space.

Flipkart is planning to go mobile-only within a year. Following the announcement that Myntra will shut down its website on May 1, Flipkart had said the E-commerce firm will too shift to an app only model within a year as traffic from mobile had grown nearly 10 times in just 12 months. Flipkart has been persistently looking to improve and expand its mobile app capabilities and plans to invest in and acquire other companies in this domain.

After this acquisition, Appiterate mobile marketing automation platform will be integrated into Flipkart mobile app to help in precise targeting of users based on their activity on the app and website. Appiterate has raised money from institutional investors like SAIF partners and angel investors.