Zovi founders Manish Chopra and Satish Mani have raised $50 million in funding from Paytm, an undisclosed investor and existing investors SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management for establishing an online to offline app-only marketplace called Little. The founders will use the funds for hiring senior level employees, build its technology and sign up merchants on its platform. The company claims it currently has 400 employees, which it expects to expand to 1,000 by March 2016. It also claims to have enrolled more than 5,000 merchants in India, and that its platform will go live in March 2016 across 11 cities with over 50,000 deals. Chopra and Mani will continue to build the Zovi platform as well. The ‘Little’ app will basically act as a discovery platform for customers while letting offline merchants sell online to users in the area. For users the platform will list real time and location based merchandise across services like restaurants, movies, hotels, salons, gyms, spas etc. Merchants on the other hand, will get data about customers in their area and the ability to send notifications and relevant deals to customers. Little will partner with Paytm for payments through its platform, while conversely offering all the deals available on Paytm. Medianama’s take: There are various startups in India that let users find hotels, restaurants etc. locally, but Little is unique in that it acts more like a portal for merchants to interact and send offers to users nearby, rather than a simple aggregator for users to…
