Published: 4/1/2021
Good morning, folks, Vedica here today. Also, happy April Fool's Day! I think the government took the prize of best joke tbh, first announcing a substantial cut in interest rates on small savings schemes and then saying, oops just an oversight! In news today, Amazon has acquired Perpule, and Byju's is reportedly looking to acquire Epic.
➡️ Amazon has acquired Perpule, a startup that is helping offline stores go online. Perpule, which had raised $6.36 million, offers a mobile payments device (point of sale machine) to offline retailers to help them accept digital payments and also establish presence on various mini app stores including those run by Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay in India.
➡️ Perpule’s PoS billing solution product UltraPOS helps retailers in the electronics, fashion, food and beverage, and groceries sectors to improve their efficiency. Its clientele base includes BigBazaar, Oyo, Udaan, Curefit, Wakefit, 24SEVEN among others.
➡️ Amazon paid $14.7 million to acquire the Indian startup in an all-cash deal. The company is expected to spend an additional $5 million or so to compensate Perpule’s employees.
➡️ As we've covered many times here, Amazon is heavily engaging with offline players in India. In that sense, this acquisition makes sense. Techcrunch writes: "Amazon has aggressively engaged with physical stores in India in recent years, using their vast presence in the nation to expand its delivery network and warehouses and even just relying on their inventory to drive sales."
➡️ In June 2020 Amazon’s payment arm Amazon Pay launched a ‘Smart Stores’ feature in so users can scan the store’s QR code and explore products inside the store. Retailers have been using the feature to enable digital storefront instantly. Entrackr reports that that Perpule might now power and drive the adoption of Smart Stores with its PoS solution.
2. https://tcrn.ch/3m9xrQk: Byju's in talks to acquire Epic
➡️ When we covered Byju's recent fundraise we noted that the company is probably going to use some of that money to acquire a US-based edtech player. It's now being reported that Byju's is in talks with online reading platform Epic. The startup offers unlimited access to over 40,000 books, videos and quizzes from more than 250 publishers to kids aged 12 or younger.
➡️ Apparently the deal values Epic at “significantly” over $300 million dollars, even though this nothing has obviously been finalized or reported. The company has raised more than $51M so far.
➡️ Epic, which is backed by Evolution Media, reaches reaches 50M+ children in the US, a number that's spiked since Covid. The company also claims that that over 1 million teachers across more than 90% of U.S. elementary schools use Epic.
➡️ Children read over a billion books on Epic last year. The company collects and analyzes real-time anonymized and aggregated data on how many children read a book, how deeply they engage with it and where their interests start to fall off. The firm now plans to release several print versions of its own original titles at Walmart, Target and Sam’s Club later this year.
➡️ Byju's has been exploring expansion in the US for a while now, and in 2019 acquired U.S.-based Osmo, which offers “blended learning” apps to integrate offline activities for kids aged between five to 12. This will be an interesting acquisition. I personally think the company is really cool, and Byju's being involved in content creation that is not test prep is something I can totally get behind.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1377326681472561155?s=20
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