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Flipkart, the country’s largest e-commerce marketplace, has acquired Israel-based Upstream Commerce, a leading player in real-time pricing and product assortment optimisation solutions. This acquisition is in line with Flipkart’s vision to solve e-commerce challenges through technology innovations — both through in-house efforts and the inorganic route.
“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,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, in a statement.
Last month, Flipkart acquired Liv.ai, an AI start-up founded in 2015, that converts speech to text in 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, and Bengali to serve customers in Tier-2 and -3 towns.
Expanding footprint
“With the Upstream Commerce acquisition, we will now have tech and talent presence across Asia, the US and Israel, some of the key global hubs for innovation. The team is highly talented and as we welcome them to Flipkart we are also looking forward to making Israel one of our excellence centres to do cutting-edge data science work,” he said.
Upstream Commerce builds cloud-based, automated competitive pricing and product analysis solutions. These solutions will strengthen Flipkart’s ability to deliver insights to its sellers, help them optimise their product assortment, pricing strategies and find gaps in the market. Upstream Commerce was backed by YL Ventures as a lead investor from its inception to acquisition. Avendus Capital was the financial advisor to Upstream Commerce.
The Upstream Commerce team of close to 20 people, will continue to work out of Israel.
Anil Goteti, Head of Marketplace, Flipkart, said “While we have been actively developing machine learning algorithms to further improve the selection and pricing parameters for sellers, we believe that through added capabilities from Upstream, we will be able to provide automated pricing and help plan better selection in the most accurate, timely, and profitable way.”
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