Go-Jek acquires Pianta

Go-Jek, the Indonesian ride-hailing service backed by Sequoia Capital, KKR & Co and Warburg Pincus, has acquired Bangalore based health care marketplace Pianta, its third acquisition in India. The purchase is aimed at beefing up its engineering team in India, which is focused on product innovation and mining data to better serve Go-Jek customers in Indonesia.

Go-Jek, which introduced a mobile app in January 2015 to provide motorcycle rides on demand, raised more than $550 Million in a round of funding in August to compete with Uber Technologies Inc. and Grab, two private car hailing startups that have begun two wheeled services on its home turf.

Go-Jek has become one of the most popular ways to get around in Indonesia, especially in traffic snarled cities like Jakarta. The company has branched out to other services, including food delivery, same-day delivery, grocery shopping and household cleaning. In April, it introduced an e-wallet service called Go-Pay to enable payments across its diverse services.

Pianta, which helps customers find and make appointments with healthcare providers, was founded in 2015. Go-Jek has acquired two other Indian startups in the past to bolster its engineering ranks. Grab, Go-Jek rival in Indonesia, raised $750 Million this month from Investors including Softbank Group Corp.

LogiNext acquires delivery portal YourGuy

Logistics and software company LogiNext has acquired YourGuy; a Mumbai based cross category last mile delivery startup. The acquisition is aligned for strengthening and expanding LogiNext last mile delivery platform Sprintr, launched last week.

Logistics management system Sprintr is a technology driven platform to both clients and delivery partners. Aggregating delivery capacity through providing technology to delivery companies, clients can now just push orders and delivery requests through the same software across India. This enables the big businesses to get their delivery sorted, while giving a business to their delivery partners free of cost.

The Sprintr platform has an active network of 250 delivery personnel on ground; the platform is managing close to over 5000 deliveries daily. Sprintr is currently operational in Gurgaon, Mumbai, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad, handling both pre-scheduled and on-demand orders. Founded in 2014, YourGuy is valued at $1.5 Million, while processing 4,000 deliveries per day, working for clients in segments including pharmaceuticals, documents, food, retail, laundry, and grocery.

Further, being a B2B delivery portal, it hosts clients like Godrej Nature Basket, iChef, Wellness Forever, Suburban Diagnostics, and several tiffin services. After the acquisition, LogiNext major task would be to upgrade the fixed expense model of YourGuy to an automated model, allowing users to sign up and start delivering automatically.

BigBasket acquires Delyver

Founded in December 2011, BigBasket is an online grocery store. BigBasket has acquired logistics startup Delyver in a cash and stock transaction to bolster its capacity to deliver fast and compete with agile players in the segment like Grofers, PepperTap and LocalBanya. BigBasket will employ Delyver orders in 90 minutes.

BigBasket is likely to leverage Delyver expertise in hyper local delivery to roll out one hour delivery services in the six cities in which it is present i.e. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Pune, and Mumbai. It was a cash and stock deal with 50% of the amount being paid in cash. Delyver will continue to operate as a separate business while Big Basket will deploy its fleet of two-wheelers to facilitate timely delivery.

Delyver will scale to the 50 cities as and when Big Basket enters a new market. Delyver specializes in delivering orders within one hour from stores across categories such as food, vegetables and flowers. It will continue with its existing categories instead of restricting itself to just groceries. The hyper local avenue is witnessing a surge of innovations as more and more players are entering the field.

With technology snowballing or advancing to higher levels, the scope for these players is rendered wide open; the potential of this segment is estimated to be so high that even the big fish in the market have registered themselves to compete. While Amazon India has already made an entry into the Indian market with its Kirana Now, Ola has started its pilot project to deliver groceries.