Tag: Acquisition

Singapore – Gupshup, a conversational engagement platform for businesses, has announced the acquisition of OneDirect, the omnichannel, AI-enabled, customer service platform of choice for leading brands in India, South East Asia and the Middle East. The acquisition strengthens Gupshup’s suite of conversational solutions and enables superior omnichannel conversational engagement with a powerful and flexible live Agent Assist solution that can scale to thousands of agents with configurable workflows, integrations with existing CRM & helpdesk systems. The live Agent Assist solution works seamlessly with chatbot automation solutions to provide the best customer experience on-demand, 24/7, in customer’s choice of channel and language

Using a simple and unified Agent Dashboard interface, OneDirect’s platform enables businesses to manage all customer conversations across multiple channels – SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Business Messenger, RCS, Voice, Email, and more. Businesses can use Gupshup’s no and low-code chatbot automation tools to automatically deflect incoming tickets and common customer issues, freeing up time for agents to handle more complex support queries, convert prospects with consultative sales and drive commerce with personalized upsell and cross-sell.

Using OneDirect’s platform, agents are able to access a full 360-degree view of the customer profile, and their past interactions and view data stitched across existing CRM and Ticketing systems. The platform also supports active listening and monitoring across social media and includes a feedback module for timely and rapid customer experience management.

Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, said, “Customer support is being transformed with conversational experiences that deliver instant, personalized experiences using both automated and manual solutions across a range of messaging channels. Businesses are using these solutions at scale to dramatically increase customer delight and reduce support cost.”

Sheth added, “OneDirect, with their proven leadership in helping leading brands transform omni-channel customer service, is a valuable addition to our Conversational Engagement Platform. We welcome OneDirect to the Gupshup family.”

OneDirect has processed over 1 billion customer interactions across 10 different languages for leading brands across BFSI, Retail, Consumer Electronics, Travel and Hospitality. OneDirect’s customers have reported an improvement of 40% in customer satisfaction and a reduction of operational expenditures by 25%, on average. OneDirect’s notable customers have a strong overlap with those of Gupshup and include brands like Canara Bank, Tata Capital, SBI Card, PayTM, Whirlpool, IFB, Acer, ASUS, Vistara, Indigo, OYO, McDonald’s, KFC, PizzaHut, Tata Sky, Dabur, Puma, Tata CLiQ. and Flyin. 

Vishrut Chalsani, co-founder and CEO of OneDirect, shared, “We are excited to join the Gupshup family and look forward to building more efficient and personalized conversational experiences. Gupshup’s advanced AI capabilities combined with Onedirect’s robust customer service and engagement platform will provide businesses with the ability to reinvent the customer experience.”

Meanwhile, Bharat Singh, operating partner at Sequoia Capital, commented, OneDirect’s key investors include Sequoia Capital, American Express and ru-Net. “Gupshup’s proven expertise and market leadership in the CPaaS space and OneDirect’s truly omnichannel customer service platform is a winning combo for businesses looking to redefine digital customer experience (CX).”

“This will help both companies unlock new growth opportunities and further scale their enterprise CX offerings,” Bharat adds.

Singapore – Integrated end-to-end e-commerce practice ADA has acquired the e-commerce unit of Singapore Post (SingPost), including the unit’s assets and staff, and will further strengthen ADA‘s e-commerce capabilities in technology and enablement in Asia-Pacific.

They are offering clients fully integrated services in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, and South Korea. Through this acquisition, ADA will seek to deepen its strategic partnership with the SingPost Group in distribution and logistics across Asia.

Srinivas Gattamneni, chief executive officer at ADA, said, “I am thrilled to expand our e-commerce family – ADA is now over 1,000 strong across 10 markets, comprised of e-commerce practitioners, data and digital specialists, industry experts, and management consultants.” 

He added, “The addition of SingPost’s e-commerce arm marks a milestone in ADA’s e-commerce practice expansion plans as we ramp up our end-to-end e-commerce solutions with enhanced e-commerce technology expertise and services, complementing it with our deeply integrated services of combining media, creative, and analytics.”

Meanwhile, Koh Jin Kiat, senior vice president for customer engagement and commercial at SingPost, commented “E-commerce has a high level of penetration in Southeast Asia today, and this proportion will only grow from here.” 

He added, “This deal is only the start of a strategic partnership with ADA, and we look forward to complementing their business with our wide suite of e-commerce logistics solutions within the Asia Pacific region, making it a win-win for both firms as our clients will get to scale up their operations with ADA’s integrated offerings.”

Singapore – Fintech firm MatchMove has acquired Singapore-based e-commerce startup Shopmatic for US$200m. The combined company will enable MatchMove to provide its banking-as-a-service capabilities to Shopmatic’s ecosystem of over a million e-commerce SME customers.

This deal is the first in a series of planned acquisitions for MatchMove to create an end-to-end service for companies in Southeast Asia aiming to digitalise their offerings. MatchMove has grown its presence rapidly across Southeast Asia in recent times and has customers across Singapore, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam.

MatchMove’s platform provides customisable, fast, secure and regulated embedded financial services, such as banking-in-an-app, powered by APIs, to help enterprise firms offer richer services to their SME customers. Meanwhile, Shopmatic offers small businesses an e-commerce presence, complete with chat, social media, a webstore and automated access to the world’s largest e-marketplaces.

The combined entity will operate under the MatchMove Group name, while retaining their individual customer-facing brands for the immediate period. Shopmatic CEO Anurag Avula, will continue to lead the Shopmatic business while Shailesh Naik, CEO at MatchMove, will helm the Singapore-headquartered group as it seeks to add further complementary acquisitions to its stable of SaaS infrastructure solutions.

Naik said, “Shopmatic has built an amazing business and team with proven ecommerce tools which support SMEs to trade online. The acquisition provides a large user base to deploy our financial services, reaching a huge sector of the economy at scale. Enterprise customers can now completely digitalise their supply chains – providing services like supply chain lending and vendor payments through a single platform to Shopmatic’s ecosystem of SME customers.”

Meanwhile, Avula commented, “We are building a scalable, business-friendly platform-as-a-service with intelligent tools and data, so every business has the ability to create amazing products to address their markets and while addressing the challenges of moving digital money securely.”

He added, “MatchMove plans to provide modular services, so customers can select and tailor the digital services they need to deliver their commercial objectives. In addition to their existing e-commerce services, Shopmatic merchants will now be able to access embedded banking-as-a-service through MatchMove, enabling their buyers to make and collect payments seamlessly and at a lower cost.”

Singapore — CleverTap, the modern and integrated retention cloud company, has announced it has signed definitive agreements to fully acquire San Francisco-based Leanplum, a multi-channel customer engagement platform with the deal is expected to close in Q2 of 2022.

Sunil Thomas, co-founder and executive chairman of CleverTap, said “Our combined strength will be a game-changing force for user engagement, retention and monetization, creating tremendous value for our customers. I am very excited to welcome Leanplum to the CleverTap family.”

The two companies will work with digital brands to help increase their users’ engagement, retention and lifetime value by making every user experience hyper-personalized, relevant and contextual at scale in real time. As more businesses become digital-first, brands need to serve their users with delightful moments where they are, when they want and on their preferred channel. CleverTap and Leanplum will bring real-time hyper-personalization, A/B testing and increased scalability to its omnichannel engagement, analytics and segmentation product lines.

As a result, growth and marketing teams globally will now be able to utilize the only end-to-end user engagement and retention cloud platform, enabling them to break down user communication silos and increase the overall lifetime value of each user.

Momchil Kyurkchiev, co-founder and chief product officer of Leanplum, said, “When we started Leanplum, our vision was to meet customers’ real-time needs at the cutting edge of technology. We have succeeded in that, but as the market has matured, to fully meet the increasing demands put on brands today, we needed to bring in the best analytics, segmentation, and engagement tools, to help our customers build valuable, long-term relationships with their customers. This is why joining forces with CleverTap makes the most sense, and I am excited about the combined capabilities we will now bring to Leanplum customers worldwide.”

Simultaneously, Sidharth Malik, CEO of CleverTap, shared, “This coming together with Leanplum marks a monumental moment across the marketing technology landscape. Our ‘better together’ vision is about integrating our cumulative strengths around people, process and technology to cement our position as the global leader in the user engagement and retention space.”

This buyout will establish CleverTap as a success-driven company with development centres and customer-facing and success teams across North America, Europe, Latin America, India, South East Asia and the Middle East. Combining the product stack of the two organizations, this acquisition will enhance CleverTap’s capabilities and take its total customer base to over 1000 customers in more than 100 countries around the world.

Vietnam – Virtuos, a global game development company, has announced the completion of its acquisition of Glass Egg Digital Media (“Glass Egg”), a 2D and 3D art production studio with 400 employees based in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. Following the acquisition, Glass Egg will rebrand itself as “Glass Egg – a Virtuos Studio”. The studio will continue to operate independently, with Phil Tran and Steve Reid staying on to helm the studio as CEO and CFO, respectively.

Together with Glass Egg, Virtuos which already owns HCMC-based Sparx* will employ close to 1,000 game specialists in Vietnam, where another studio will be opened in June 2022. This supports Virtuos’ goal of growing to 1,500 employees locally, and becoming the largest game development company in Vietnam.

Gilles Langourieux, CEO at Virtuos, said, “We’re excited to bring the Glass Egg team on board the Virtuos family. With its strong brand equity, coupled with its sizeable and long-term local operations, Glass Egg demonstrates excellent synergies with Virtuos, and we look forward to harnessing our combined expertise to strengthen our commitment to excellence.”

Virtuos’ acquisition of Glass Egg is set to bolster the company’s offerings in art production and game development. Leveraging Vietnam’s position as a Southeast Asian game development hub, the new studio will not only bring the company closer to its Asian clients, but also give Virtuos access to a deep pool of creative talent.

Phil Tran, CEO at Glass Egg – a Virtuos Studio, shared, “We are honored to be a part of an industry stalwart, Virtuos. This means our staff will have the ability to expand skills and take on a wider array of projects, which will benefit our clients as well. With the support and resources of Virtuos, we are energized to meaningfully contribute to the industry in its next phase of growth.”

Virtuos was advised by Lincoln International, while Sperry, Mitchell & Company assisted in negotiations and served as the exclusive financial advisor to Glass Egg.

Meanwhile, Steve Reid, CFO at Glass Egg – a Virtuos Studio, commented, “Operational integration is our top priority post-acquisition. By using the same project management, communication tools and platforms, we can better facilitate interoperability with other Virtuos studios globally, and ensure we have more production options to offer to our clients than competitors.”

In addition, Glass Egg, a Virtuos Studio, joins the likes of Volmi Games, CounterPunch Studios, Black Shamrock, and Sparx* in Virtuos’ long history of studio acquisitions and integrations over the past decade. In 2021, Baring Private Equity Asia invested $150 million in Virtuos, and the company launched a studio in Lyon, France, to further expand its global network of studios.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Car e-commerce platform Carsome has announced the acquisition of the businesses of WapCar and AutoFun. Upon the completion of the acquisition, Carsome set up the parent company, WapCar AutoFun Sdn Bhd (WapCar), as a fully-owned subsidiary of the Carsome group in Malaysia.

WapCar first established its first flagship brands, WapCar and AutoFun in 2019. Today, it operates a number of automotive content websites and social media channels across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam. WapCar provides a full range of content which covers car exploration, transaction, and ownership experiences, using industry-leading technology to help customers in Southeast Asia find their perfect car and immerse themselves in all things related to automotive. 

The platform also produces, distributes and manages highly-engaging professionally generated content (PGC) and user generated content (UGC) at scale.

According to Eric Cheng, co-founder and group CEO at Carsome, WapCar has built a strong automotive content strategy in Southeast Asia, liked by a large and engaging customer base. He added that the partnership will enable Carsome to capture and serve customers from their early stage of car exploration and bring a more engaging and fun experience to the car transaction and ownership journey.

“We are thrilled to announce the partnership with WapCar and a team with seasoned expertise in the content space. We believe our collaboration through content, technology and data will augment our ability to bring trust, transparency and choice to customers together,” he said.

Meanwhile, Sting Peng, general manager at WapCar, commented, “We are excited to work with Carsome to collectively provide a smooth car buying and selling experience to millions of WapCar users on our platform across the region, as well as an end-to-end solution in their car transaction and ownership journey.”

Paris, France – Global advertising agency and public relations company Publicis Groupe has announced the acquisition of Profitero, a global SaaS e-commerce intelligence platform. Through the acquisition, Publicis Groupe will combine Profitero’s industry leading product data and analytics with the Groupe’s retail media, data, and commerce solutions to offer unmatched capabilities for brands to maximise their online sales.

Profitero’s solutions provide actionable insights and product visibility to more than 4,000 brands and 70 million products on more than 700 retailer websites, in over 50 countries every day. 

In addition, said acquisition will allow Profitero to access the necessary resources and capabilities to expand on its analytics core. As a result, it will become the first global commerce platform to truly empower brands by using predictive intelligence to deliver the best product experience, optimise content, increase results of organic search, compare prices with competitors, monitor product availability and track customer ratings and reviews, among other features.

“As the lines between offline and online shopping blur due to digitally-influenced sales, Profitero’s ecommerce and omnichannel analytics offering allows brands to anticipate, activate, and automate the next best action to fuel profitable growth for each item of their product catalogue,” Publicis Groupe said in a press statement.

Profitero will remain a product-focused company within Publicis, led by CEO Bryan Wiener and president Sarah Hofstetter. Wiener will report to Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun.

Sadoun said, “By adding Profitero to our existing assets, we are now uniquely positioned across the four key pillars our clients need to connect, to capture an unfair share of the exponential growth in online sales. With us, our clients will seamlessly understand people, how they shop better than anyone else, thanks to Epsilon; optimise their online product catalogue thanks to Profitero; maximise their online spend with retailers thanks to CitrusAd and the scale of Publicis Media.”

He added, “And they will be able to deliver unique, creative, customer experiences, through platforms backed by Publicis Sapient’s engineering expertise. I am delighted to welcome Sarah, Bryan, and their outstanding team of experts to the Publicis family.”

Meanwhile, Wiener commented, “This is the best of both worlds as we retain our entrepreneurial spirit as a product-led organisation while benefiting from the Publicis Groupe’s diverse capabilities and scale. This brings immediate value to our clients and employees with increased product and technology investment, infusion of new media and content activation capabilities and tapping into the Groupe’s global talent to fuel our continued growth.”

Hanoi, Vietnam – Local bank VPBank in Vietnam has announced that it was permitted to go through with the acquisition of OPES Insurance, aimed at expanding its business lines to non-life and health insurance, paired with its current life insurance business collaborated with AIA Vietnam. This announcement was held during the bank’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Hanoi last 29 April.

Through the meeting, VPBank also shared that it will be contributing VND20t towards its securities arm of ASC – a subsidiary obtained earlier in the year, to tap into the investment banking and wealth management segments.

Moreover, the bank will be lifting its foreign ownership limit to 30% of the chartered capital to accommodate the private placement to the foreign investor accordingly. The proceeds obtained from the share issuance will be utilised to enhance VPBank’s financial and management capabilities, in order to extend the operation scale of the bank to serve growing credit demand.

Sydney, Australia – Global insights and consulting company Kantar has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Blackwood Seven, the AI-enabled marketing ROI firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

The integration of Blackwood Seven’s capabilities is expected to bolster Kantar’s marketing ROI analysis expertise. Kantar Australia will be integrating Blackwood Seven’s unified marketing measurement solution powered by Hamilton.AI for a range of uses including budget setting, competitor analysis, reducing customer acquisition cost, and in measuring brand equity and minimising customer churn. The deal is scheduled to be completed by the end of April.

Straford Rodrigues, head of media and marketing effectiveness at Kantar Australia, said that clients need a solution that brings together the insights they need for both strategic and tactical media investment decision-making futureproofed against cookie deprecation.

“I am thrilled to have Unified Marketing Measurement and Optimisation as a new Kantar Analytics solution to answer incremental client questions in the marketing effectiveness space. In this world of increasing media proliferation, there is a critical need among advertisers and marketers to measure effectiveness and ROI at a channel/publisher level for both on and offline media. This solution will help tease out performance effects by the channel at a granular level,” Rodrigues said.

Kantar‘s new marketing effectiveness solution, Unified Marketing Measurement, and Optimisation, learns from the effects of past media investments, modeling a multitude of scenarios to optimize future media plans down to individual publisher levels. Australian businesses can benefit from the offer immediately.

Rodrigues added, “Combining this with our current marketing ROI solutions and global analytics expertise means we can quickly scale our sophisticated marketing effectiveness offer benefiting a greater number of Australian clients.”

Meanwhile, Kantar Australia’s head of analytics John Cucka said the practice has seen tremendous growth since launching in 2019.

“The Athena platform evaluates long-term brand contributions and the Hamilton.AI platform will integrate touchpoint modelling into traditional marketing mix modelling, giving a portfolio that delivers across marketing decision-making needs.”

Singapore – Singapore-based tech company The Parentinc has announced the successful completion of the acquisition of Webtretho and Bé Yêu, a women and parenting communities platform in Vietnam.

Founded in 2002, Webtretho is an online destination for women in Vietnam with millions of visitors every year. Webtretho’s mission to elevate women and enrich their lives has enabled the company to build one of SEA’s prominent user-generated content platforms where members share knowledge and experience in a wide range of topics including parenthood, and pregnancy, childcare, beauty, healthcare, and entertainment.

Webtretho also operates Bé Yêu, a well-known Vietnamese social network aimed to provide a discussion platform for expectant parents and families looking to raise their children better.

Roshni Mahtani-Cheung, group CEO and founder of The Parentinc, said that they are extremely thrilled to welcome the team at Webtretho and Bé Yêu into their family. Cheung added that Webtretho is a household name in Vietnam trusted by almost every young mother over the last two decades.

“Combining that with The Parentinc’s deep technology and commercial capabilities will bring a new era of innovation to help Vietnamese parents have healthier pregnancies and raise healthy families. We are deeply humbled by the opportunity to be able to partner with the Webtretho and Bé Yêu team to further our joint mission in such big strides,” Cheung said.

Meanwhile, Nikki Assavathorn, The Parentinc Cluster Country Head of Thailand and Vietnam, shares, “The Parentinc is the number one parenting community in 11 markets across the world. We are very excited to partner with the Webtretho team to now be the number one parenting community in Vietnam as well.

Assavathom added, “Combining Webtretho’s audience in Vietnam and The Parentinc’s technology will provide our advertising partners an unprecedented way to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.”

Phan Thanh Huong, CEO of Webtretho, commented, “This is a new phase of growth for Webtretho and our Vietnam team. I am delighted by this new development in the business and I very much look forward to this partnership with Roshni, Nikki, and The Parentinc team.”