Oyo Hotels acquires Innov8

Oyo Hotels and homes, the world’s third-largest chain of hotels, homes, managed living and workspaces has confirmed its acquisition of Innov8, a co-working spaces provider, highlighting the company’s increasing focus on the fast-growing segment.

Charting out its multi-brand approach to the workspace’s opportunity in India, Oyo introduced three co-working brands under Oyo Workspaces: Innov8, Powerstation and Workflo for upper mid-scale, mid-scale and economy segments, respectively.

 

OYO Workspaces is set to open the door to its more than 21 workspaces, with over 15,000 seats across more than 10 cities in India, it said in a statement. Of these, Innov8 is currently spread across six cities—Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Chandigarh and Mumbai, with 16 centres hosting over 6,000 employees of brands like Swiggy, Paytm, Pepsi, Nykaa, OLX and Lenskart. Powerstation has one centre in Gurugram with over 1,000 seats and Workflo has set up four centres across NCR, Hyderabad and Bengaluru with a hosting capacity of over 1,500 seats in total already.

Oyo pegs co-working spaces to be a $20 billion business opportunity in India by 2020. Oyo’s entry into the workspaces business comes at a time when India is already seeing the emergence of several large companies in this segment, including the likes of WeWork India, CoWrks, Awfis and Smartworks.

Zomato to sell UAE business to Delivery Hero

Berlin based food delivery player Delivery Hero has acquired United Arab Emirates (UAE) business of Gurugram based food delivery and restaurant discovery company, Zomato.

The acquisition will add 1.2 Mn monthly orders and $2 Mn monthly revenue to Delivery Hero’s Middle East and North Africa region business and will strengthen its leadership position in the UAE. The online food ordering company Delivery Hero is present across 41 countries in Europe, the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. Delivery Hero also operates its own delivery service primarily in over 200 cities around the world. In India, Delivery Hero was invested in Foodpanda but later sold it for 1% stake in Ola in 2017.

UAE was the first global foray of Zomato in 2012 and soon accounted for 20% of its orders. The company also launched its premium service Zomato Gold in UAE in 2017 and in one year had over 380 restaurant partners for over 15,000 Zomato Gold members.

Zomato has been in a tough situation since its Bengaluru-based rival Swiggy raised $1 Bn in 2018, at the end to the year after joining the unicorn club earlier in the year. To challenge this, Zomato has also been in talks to raise a large funding round of $500 Mn-$1 Bn. Zomato recorded $1Bn in annual gross merchandise value. It also posted a 40% growth in its revenue for FY18 and targeted expansion to 100 cities across India.

Swiggy acquires AI start-up Kint.io

Online food delivery start-up Swiggy has made its first acqui-hire in the deep technology space through an AI start-up Kint.io for an undisclosed amount. As part of this, the founding team of Kint.io will join Swiggy.

The Bengaluru-headquartered company, which is also foraying into the hyperlocal delivery space, will join Swiggy to boost its computer vision technology and elevate consumer experience. The acqui-hire development comes just a few months after the company closed its mammoth funding round of $1 billion, which was led by Naspers and saw participation from China’s Tencent Holdings.

The round saw Swiggy’s valuation shoot up to $3.3 billion. The company had been on the lookout to close a few acquisitions following the funding round. Founded in 2014, Kint.io applies deep learning and computer vision to object recognition in video. Prior to this, Swiggy had made an acquisition in the food-delivery space through a buyout of on-demand delivery start-up Scootsy in August

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As consumer internet companies in India are growing and raising money, importance is being given to building a more robust technology stack for an enhanced experience. In August, Flipkart acquired AI-led speech recognition start-up Liv.ai as they looked at elevating consumer experience of the next 200 million shoppers. Following this, the Walmart-backed company also acquired Upstream, an analytics company from Israel, in a bid to deliver real-time pricing and product analytics to the platform’s sellers.

Ola’s Foodpanda acquires Holachef

Foodpanda, the online food ordering and delivery startup owned by Ola, has acquired Mumbai based food-tech startup Holachef Hospitality Pvt. Ltd for an undisclosed sum. Foodpanda will take over Holachef’s employees and kitchen equipment’s. 

Holachef marks Ola’s second acquisition within a year, which bought Foodpanda from Germany’s Delivery Hero in December last year. Ola, run by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd, is seemingly leaving no stone unturned to fight it out in the online food ordering space dominated by Swiggy (Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd) and Zomato (Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd). Ola rival Uber India Pvt. Ltd too has entered the space with UberEats India.

Foodpanda will foray into cloud kitchens with its acquisitions. It also plans to launch its own food brand across categories. The company claims to have a network of over 1 lakh delivery partners and access to over 150 million customers. Holachef delivers home-cooked food to customers and was operational in Mumbai and Pune. The company, backed by Ratan Tata, Kalaari Capital and India Quotient, had raised $9.6 million cumulatively till date, according to data from Crunchbase.

While India’s food-tech space has seen rapid expansion in the past couple of years, several startups—including TinyOwl, Yumist and Dazo—operating in the domain have shut shop. Bengaluru-based SpoonJoy was acquired by online groceries firm Grofers in 2015.

Foodpanda in talks to buy Holachef

Foodpanda, the online food ordering and delivery marketplace owned by Ola, is in advanced talks to buy Mumbai based food tech startup Holachef Hospitality Pvt. Ltd, which shuttered operations nearly three months ago. Foodpanda will acquire Holachef Staff, brand name and kitchen equipment.

A potential acquisition would be the second within a year for Ola, India’s largest taxi aggregator. Last December, the company, run by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd, bought Foodpanda from its German parent. A potential deal signals Ola’s aggressive expansion to compete in the online food ordering and delivery segment alongside players like Swiggy (Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd), Zomato (Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd) and the recent entrant UberEats India.

Founded in 2014, Holachef, which delivers home-cooked food to customers, closed operations in April. The startup’s Twitter handle is flooded with customer queries about its sudden absence from delivery platforms. Holachef, which was operational in Mumbai and Pune, had raised ₹ 2 crore from diamond merchant Ashok Kumar in February this year. The company backed by Ratan Tata, Kalaari Capital and venture capital fund India Quotient has raised $9.6 million cumulatively till date.

Ola was also exploring creating an independent food technology company on the lines of Flipkart’s model and was in talks to buy food brand FreshMenu (Foodvista India Pvt. Ltd) along with another private label. Holachef joins the likes of Gurugram-based Twigly that three weeks back shut operations after being in business for three years. Among other food-tech businesses, Spoonjoy (acquired by grocery delivery firm Grofers), TinyOwl, Yumist and Dazo had to shut shop as raising funds amid immense competition became increasingly difficult.

Swiggy acquires Scootsy

Food ordering and delivery platform Swiggy has acquired Scootsy, an intracity delivery service provider in an all-cash deal. Scootsy provides delivery service for restaurants, toys & beauty products and electronics items among others.

Scootsy is a well-loved brand that enjoys loyalty from both its restaurant partners and the consumer. With a shared belief of providing a superior user experience, its addition will extend the convenience and reliability that Swiggy is synonymous. Swiggy will strengthen Scootsy curated restaurant network and help the brand expand to newer cities using Swiggy operational strength. Scootsy will continue to operate as an independent app post the acquisition.

For Swiggy, the acquisition of Mumbai-based Scootsy is in line with its vision to provide a superior consumer experience and the widest restaurant choices for consumers. It will extend the breadth and selection of Swiggy existing network of 40,000 restaurants by adding more curated restaurants to it. Scootsy was founded in 2015. Last year, it raised $3.6 million from Agnus Capital and Khattar Holdings.

The acquisition will enable Scootsy expansion across Mumbai and also support its foray into four to five major Indian cities in the coming months. Swiggy, which started in August 2014, is one of the fastest Indian start-ups to reach a valuation of $1 billion. In June, Swiggy announced that it has raised $210 million from a group of investors, led by Naspers and billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global. The fund raise valued Swiggy at about $1.3 billion.

Ola acquires Foodpanda India Unit

Ola, operated by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd, has acquired food delivery start-up Foodpanda India from its German Parent Delivery Hero AG in an all-stock deal that will see the ride hailing major infuse $200 Million in Foodpanda India operations. Under the deal, Foodpanda’s India business will be transferred to Ola in exchange for the latter’s stock.

The deal marks Ola’s foray into the online food ordering and delivery segment, a business shaped in India by the likes of Zomato and Swiggy, and one where Ola’s biggest rival, Uber, has been making strides recently through its unit UberEATS. Ola too tested what it called Ola Cafe in 2014, but shut down the unit shortly after. The collaboration between Ola and Foodpanda India unlocks the power of a partnership that will help Foodpanda India grow as the most preferred online food delivery service in the country.

The deal comes months after Bengaluru-based Ola raised a huge $1.1 billion (another $1 billion is likely to come in soon) from SoftBank Group and Tencent Holdings to strengthen its position in India. Mobility start-ups with terabytes of data on local routes and consumer app usage patterns are generally believed to be better placed in running a delivery business. In 2014, San Francisco-based Uber launched UberEATS as a pilot project and has since taken the service to 27 countries—and seven Indian cities in quick succession since May this year.

Foodpanda India was set up as the local unit of Berlin-based Foodpanda GmbH, a Rocket Internet portfolio firm, in 2012. The company has had a tough stint in India, given service quality issues, layoffs and ceding of market share to rivals. Last year, Delivery Hero acquired Foodpanda GmbH but the deal did not have a substantial trickle-down impact on India operations.

Swiggy acqui-hires 48East

Bengaluru based food ordering and delivery startup Swiggy has acqui-hired the management team of Bengaluru based gourmet Asian Food startup 48East in order to further broaden its senior leadership. Following this acqui-hire, the company looks to serve its consumers more efficiently and consequently grow in the market.

Swiggy Access, for the uninitiated, is an initiative aimed at reaching more customers and making its delivery more seamless. Geared towards facilitating the business expansion of partners on the platform, the new service allows restaurant partners to set up kitchen spaces in areas where they do not have a physical presence.

Swiggy currently has a presence in more than 10 cities across the country and claims to have tie-ups with around 20,000 restaurants in these cities. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised a total funding of $155.5 Mn (INR 1000 Cr) till date and clocks over 4 Mn transactions per month on its platform. By acqui-hiring 48East, the online food delivery platform is looking to bolster its presence in the market, amidst competition from highly funded players like UberEATS and Zomato.

Its biggest rival Zomato has also made a number of investments and acquisitions in the last couple of months. In the second of September, the foodtech unicorn took over Bengaluru-based Runnr, a B2B online service provider platform for hyperlocal logistics services. The move was aimed at strengthening Zomato’s food delivery capacity. A week later, the Gurugram-based company also invested an undisclosed amount of funding in the Hyderabad-based foodtech startup, TinMen.

Zomato acquires delivery startup Runnr

Food technology startup Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd has acquired delivery start-up Runnr as part of a widely expected, all stock deal that would help the former significantly shore up its food delivery business, amid intense competition from rapidly growing rivals such as Swiggy.

The deal also hands out a lifeline to Runnr which has struggled to raise funds in the recent past. It has raised about $20-25 million since it started out in 2015 from investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Runnr was a product of a merger between hyperlocal delivery start-up Roadrunnr and food-ordering start-up TinyOwl.

Goyal said Runnr was already fulfilling about 300,000 orders a month. He added that Runnr founder Mohit Kumar will remain chief executive and will continue to work on the strategic vision for the start-up with the rest of his team. He said the acquired firm will continue to be run independently by Kumar.

Prior to its buyout of Runnr, Zomato used to aggregate restaurants on its platform and works with third-party delivery partners such as Runnr and Grab to execute deliveries. In September 2015, Zomato had picked up a minority stake in Grab (Grab a Grub Services Pvt. Ltd) to bolster its food delivery business.