Paytm acqui-hires Shopsity

Paytm, India’s largest mobile payments and commerce platform has acquired the team at Shopsity, a Delhi based startup that offered O2O solutions to small retail stores. This move is in line with Paytm vision to create strong seller focused services to its offline merchants.

Shopsity is focused on small unorganized retailers, providing them with tools to attract and retain customers. Paytm is actively working to strengthen seller services for the 800,000 strong offline sellers on the Paytm ecosystem. Launched in March 2015, Shopsity is an O2O mobile platform, where you get to see what’s selling in stores nearby. During July last year, the platform had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Shopclues and Droom, and Netprice.

In July, Paytm started accepting payments at retail chains like Spencer’s Retail, Heritage Fresh, More, WH Smith, Kendriya Bhandar, V2 Retail, Value Plus and Pai International (Pai Mobile). This followed its tie-up with quick-service-restaurants such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Cafe Coffee Day, Costa Coffee, Barista, Vaango, among others. Paytm claims to have 125 million wallets.

In September, Paytm had acqui-hired EduKart, an e-learning marketplace for an undisclosed amount. In January this year, Paytm acquired Shifu, a consumer behavior prediction platform for an undisclosed amount. A month before that, the company acquired Gurgaon-based services marketplace Near.in for $2 million.

Paytm acquires Shifu

Payments service provider Paytm, run by One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd, has acquired consumer behavior prediction and recommendation platform Shifu for $8 Million. Delhi based Shifu, run by Signal Inc. started operations in August 2012. It mines the smartphone usage patterns of users and makes personalized recommendations to them.

Shifu has been quite popular as an intelligent task managing application. This acquisition will give further impetus to focus on Artificial Intelligence. By predicting user behavior based on past usage, location and other data points, Paytm platform will be able to offer relevant recommendations to users. Paytm will be able to offer a highly intuitive and personalized experience to users.

Shifu is a free task managing app. Once the app is installed, it analyses the usage patterns of the device owner and makes a variety of suggestions based on a predictive algorithm. Paytm has been actively investing in startups. The company in October invested in transportation app Jugnoo, in Hyperlocal deals platform ‘Little’ in July, and in logistics startup LogiNext.

Noida based Paytm currently has a user base of more than 100 Million. The company is backed by investors including Alibaba Group, Saif Partners, Sapphire Venture and Silicon Valley Bank. Paytm which started out as payments solutions providers ventured into e-commerce in May 2014. In November, Paytm acquired home service marketplace Near.in for an undisclosed amount to focus on O2O and Hyperlocal commerce.