Amazon Pay to acquire Tapzo

Amazon India Payment arm, Amazon Pay, has acquired Bengaluru based and Sequoia backed startup Tapzo, as the e-commerce giant attempts to aggressively ramp up its payments business and get a bigger slice of India’s booming digital payments economy, currently dominated by the likes of Paytm.

Prior to its acquisition, Tapzo counted the likes of Sequoia Capital and American Express Co. among its investors, and had raised over $20 million since it started out in 2009. In its current avatar, Tapzo allows users to access over 35 apps, including the likes of Flipkart, Amazon, Uber and Ola, among others.

Founded in 2009 as a complaint redressal forum called Akosha, the service was rebranded and launched as Helpchat. Helpchat started out as a personal assistant platform with a chatting feature, but even that pivot proved unsuccessful for Singla and the rest of his team. Eventually, Helpchat was pivoted and re-launched as an all-in-one platform, Tapzo, in November 2016.

Amazon separately launched a new bill payments service, which will enable prepaid and postpaid bill payments through its Amazon Pay wallet. As part of the new service, Amazon has forged tie-ups with hundreds of billers for electricity, mobile and broadband bill payments, among others.

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.