Mswipe acquires PayU offline POS Business

PoS (Point of Sale) solutions provider Mswipe has entered into a strategic partnership with online payment service provider PayU India. Mswipe has taken over the offline merchant acquiring business of PayU India.

Mswipe will merge PayU existing offline PoS division team into its existing operations and workforce expanding its network to 220K terminals across 550+ cities. On the other hand, merchants associated with Mswipe will now be able to avail Internet payments services offered by PayU India. PayU offline merchant acquisition team had acquired over 9,000 offline merchants in the country. All of PayU offline merchants along with its PoS business will also get transferred to Mswipe.

Mswipe is a PoS service provider for a large merchant base. It also allows merchants to undertake plastic card payments through smartphones or ordinary feature phones. Headquartered in Mumbai, the company claims to have a team of 2000. In July 2015, the startup secured $25 Mn (about INR160 Cr) in its Series C round of funding from New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital, investment firm Meru Capital and ride hailing app, Ola, and existing investors.

PayU India is the flagship company of Naspers Group. It was established in 2011 and has over 250 payment methods and PCI (Payment Card Industry)-certified platforms. It claims to have more than 1,800 payment specialists based in local markets supporting PayU 200,000+ merchants and consumers making online payments. In September 2016, it acquired rival online payment gateway CitrusPay for $130 Mn, making it by far the biggest M&A cash deal in Indian fintech. Earlier this month, Kreditech secured $119 Mn (Euro 110 Mn) from PayU.

Zomato Acquires MaplePOS

Online Restaurant Guide Zomato announced the acquisition of MaplePOS, a cloud based point of sale product for restaurants developed by a group of techies from Delhi. Gurgaon based Zomato has already renamed the MaplePOS product to ‘Zomato Base’. Amount of Deal is not disclosed.

MaplePOS offers restaurants features such as menu and inventory management, and has built in payment solution to accept debit and credit card payments. It counts other Indian Players such as Posist and FusionResto. It offers software to manage menus, inventory, recipes, electronic receipts and a stealth feature which is not disclosed. This is the first product acquisition for Zomato.

Since July 2014, Zomato has acquired seven restaurant search and listing companies in various parts of the world. In February, this year, Zomato launched its Uber like Cashless product in Dubai. The company new buyout is a step forward towards taking an advantage over rival Foodpanda which is also aggressively expanding in its space even as Zomato gears up for launch of food service in India, this month.

The online food services market is valued at over $14 Billion in India and $371 Billion globally and increasing technology is becoming an integral part of servicing the palette. Zomato will work on integrating the POS product service with the consumer product over the next few months, after the integration, Zomato will start offering Zomato base to restaurant business across the world this fall.