Mobile VAS company Spice Digital*, a subsidiary of Spice Mobility Ltd., acquired 26% stake in Bangalore-based startup Vavia Technologies, the company informed BSE. Financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed. Vavia founder & CEO Alan D’Souza told Livemint that the company plans to expand its services to 30 new countries by the end of the current fiscal from its current presence in 6 countries. Earlier this year, in June, Vavia had partnered Spice Digital to launch its SMS-based search engine txtBrowser. It can be accessed on the short code 55444 on Airtel and MTS, 55577 on Idea and 56300 on Reliance and BSNL. At the time Vavia had claimed that txtBrowser has crossed 300 million queries, of which 200 million queries were from India. The txtBrowser service is also available in UAE, Bangladesh and Nepal. The company had also claimed that it had 4 million unique users globally and 500 developers on its service. txtBrowser competes with Intuit’s txtweb, which had partnered with Airtel to offer text-based apps to its subscribers in March. In August, Vavia had launched an anonymous social network app called Confess that allows users to share ‘secret’ communications within their connections and groups without revealing identities. Currently, only the Android version of the app is available, and the Confess website claims that the iOS will be out soon. Vavia also operates an anonymous chat platform called ChatHunt. Founded in 2008 Vavia develops web-based products and solutions for both businesses and consumers. *Disclaimer: Spice Digital is an…
