NowFloats is a technology company which helps offline businesses become relevant online by enabling them with through frictionless technology. It enables the customers by initiating their online presence by bringing the business online, auto prompting and optimizing content for local search and integrate with inventory and enable transactions. All this via the NowFloats Boost App, or simply by SMS! Founded in May 2012, the NowFloats founding team includes CEO Jasminder Singh Gulati (Jas), COO Nitin Jain, CXO Neeraj Sabharwal and CSA Ronak Kumar Samantray, who was listed among Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 in March 2016. NowFloats connects nearly 250,000 businesses online across India and works in alliance with several partners and re-sellers.
As per the latest development, NowFloats, a Hyderabad-based technology company that helps businesses go online and be discoverable using friction-less technology, has announced that it is acquiring Bengaluru-based hyper-local conversational commerce app Lookup for cash and stock. Founded in November 2015 by serial entrepreneur Deepak Ravindran, Lookup’s investors and advisors include Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Vinod Khosla, Narayana Murthy, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Oliver Samwer (GFC), Teruhido Sato (Beenos) and DeNA Japan. With this acquisition, Lookup’s technology team, product and vision become a part of the NowFloats product ecosystem to provide messaging solutions to small and medium business enterprises.
Lookup offers a WhatsApp-like interface enabling users to discover and reach out to businesses in their vicinity, while maintaining their privacy. Customers can chat with shopkeepers and restaurateurs through the app. Apart from privacy, it also helps keep up the quality of the interaction LookUp aims to simplify the way users interacts with the offline world and provides a simple conversational interface to the users in order to discover and interact with offline businesses. Lookup has existing partnerships with Roadrunner, Grab, LogiNext to even simplify delivery from the merchants and also enables the user to transact using any existing wallets like PayTM, PayU Money and OLA Money.
Speaking about the development, Ronak Kumar Samantray, Co-Founder, NowFloats mentioned,
“We wanted to invest in a conversational interface as we always believed that for certain categories (where the user needs more information before making the purchase decision) having a simple way to interact with the merchant is very important. We are going to take Lookup forward as a consumer brand to provide the simplest and fastest way for a user to buy anything from the offline world. I am very excited to have the Lookup team on-board. We aim to build Lookup further as a direct consumer channel to simplify discovery of offline businesses beyond the existing search engines and social networks”.
Adding to this Lookup Founder Mr. Deepak Ravindran will now join as the Head of Conversational Commerce at NowFloats, mentioned,
“At Lookup, we have thrived to build close relationships with other players in the same space who are trying to solve the local search, discovery and enabling. NowFloats is one of the first movers in the space who has been constantly innovating and consistently growing for many years. We saw that there was a lot of alignment and enthusiasm for NowFloats and ultimately decided it was the best way forward.”
Jasminder Singh Gulati, Co-Founder and CEO, NowFloats added,
“This acquisition is a perfect match of great Indian talent that has made its mark on the global tech arena. At NowFloats, we keep building the future and we believe this should be a game changer for our existing & new customers as well as their consumers. We are excited that the Lookup team is already aligned and focused on our shared vision, and this powerful combination will accelerate our learnings & new possibilities”.
NowFloats auto-prompts businesses on the local content searches made by their consumers with the help of its Relationship Intelligence Agent (RIA) technology, which is based on machine-learning and big-data built on a mashup of website content, Google trends, product catalogs, searches & consumer behaviour. The acquisition will help NowFloats add over 90,000 verified businesses to its existing 250,000 online businesses in India. In addition, NowFloats will also get access to over 1.2 million Lookup registered users, especially in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. The NowFloats platform already has over 250,000 businesses online – or about a third of all the small business sites in India – transacting with over 6 million consumers a month. The NowFloats platform already has over 250,000 businesses online – or about a third of all the small business sites in India – transacting with over 6 million consumers a month. NowFloats powers more than 5% of all local searches in India today and counts Sleepwell, Bayer, TVS Group, IndusInd Bank, Wicked Ride, Canada’s SiberName, and Kenya’s Datum Digital among its larger partners and customers globally.
The combined technology of NowFloats and Lookup will result in a platform that taps into two of the most organic behaviour globally – search & chat – to deliver simplicity to enabling business.
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