PayPal to acquire Honey Science

PayPal Holdings Inc. will acquire Honey Science Corp. for about $4 Billion, it’s largest-ever acquisition, adding a startup that amasses valuable data on consumer buying habits and doles out coupons for online bargains.

About 17 million people use Honey apps or web browser extensions to find discounts at online shopping sites. The start-up was profitable in 2018. Shares of the payments giant were little changed in extended trading. Honey is valued at almost twice what PayPal paid for its next-largest deal, iZettle, the Swedish provider of small-business services it purchased in 2018 and marks the first major acquisition this year.

Honey, which was founded in 2012, will keep its base in Los Angeles, and the founders will continue to run the business. The company’s services include a browser extension that automatically applies coupons at e-commerce sites. Honey’s capabilities will give customers better shopping experience, and help merchants drive sales, partly with more timely and personalized offers.

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.

Klarna Eyes Indian Shoppers

Klarna is a Sweden based e-commerce company that provides payment services for online storefronts. Their core service is to assume store claims for payments and handle customer payments, thus estimating the risk for seller and buyer. About 20% of all e-commerce sales in Sweden go through Klarna. The company has stores in seven countries in Europe. There is an office in Israel, which focuses on Research and Development.

European payment provider, which allows consumers to make online purchases using only their e-mail address and postcode with no registration or credit cards, is exploring the possibility of setting up business in India. The Stockholm based company is currently valued at around $1 Billion and active in 16 countries. The company was founded in 2005 by three students at Stockholm school of Economics and has 1,100 employees across the countries, which has its operations.

Klarna integrates the payment methods promising to make online shopping easier. About 35 Million customers have shopped from Klarna and company has 50,000 merchants. The company is focusing on removing friction and hassles from online buying. For using Klarna, there is no need to create an account or a password. Customers can shop using only their email address and postcode. The customers then confirm the purchase before choosing a payment method. Klarna has also introduced Pay after delivery as a Payment option, where the customer has 14 days to pay. This means the customer gets their goods and can make sure they are ok before paying. For this, Klarna gives full guarantee to the customers as well as merchants.

For every purchase, the company also performs a swift background check on customer information based on the speed at which they type their email address and postcode. Klarna claims to be the one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Europe and having a 10 percent market share of e-commerce in Northern Europe. Klarna is active in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.