Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, has announced that it has acquired Israeli startup Upstream Commerce. The Israeli company builds cloud-based, automated competitive pricing and product analysis solutions. Flipkart says that these solutions will strengthen its ability to deliver insights to its sellers, helping to optimize product assortment and pricing strategies and find gaps in the market to serve customers better. No financial details were disclosed but sources close to the deal say the acquisition is for about $30 million.
Upstream Commerce's Tel Aviv office will become Flipkart's development center in Israel.
Upstream Commerce was founded in 2010 by CEO Amos Peleg and CTO Shai Geva on the premise that automated retail intelligence capability should simplify and streamline the highly-complicated data-gathering process so retailers can concentrate on optimizing their merchandising, marketing and profit-making efforts.
Peleg said, “We are excited to become a part of India’s largest e-commerce player. During our discussion, as we got to know more about Flipkart, we realized that we share the same passion for technology, and the same vision for the contribution of data science to the future and success of online retail. The choice and vision of Flipkart to establish its presence in Israel through acquiring Upstream Commerce is a significant vote of confidence in the company’s team, technology and domain expertise, and are looking forward to help growing the presence of Flipkart in Israel.”
Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said, “In the past decade, Flipkart has not only pushed for e-commerce growth in India but has also solved quintessential Indian problems through technology innovations and we will continue to be aggressive in building and getting global tech to solve for some of the hardest e-commerce problems. With the Upstream acquisition, we will now have tech and talent presence across Asia, US and Israel, some of the key global hubs for innovation. The team at Upstream Commerce is highly talented and as we welcome them to Flipkart we are also looking forward to making Israel one of our excellence centers to do cutting edge data science work."
YL Ventures and Bright Capital are among Upstream Commerce's principle investors.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 25, 2018
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