Little, a hyperlocal deals marketplace, has acquired Trideal, a curated deals marketplace in Chandigarh for an undisclosed amount. Post acquisition, Trideal will be integrated into Little and its cofounders and core team will join Little.
Trideal offers deals in the food & beverages, wellness and entertainment industries and was incubated at Chitkara University. Operating across Chandigarh, Mohali and Punjab, the company claims to have 7,000 unique visitors, 8,000 merchants and 27,000 live deals.
Little, which was founded by Zovi founders Manish Chopra and Satish Mani in July this year, raked in $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 in the same month of its launch.
The founders said that they would use the funds for hiring senior level employees, build technology and sign up merchants on its platform. At that time, the company claimed to have 400 employees, with plans to expand to 1,000 by March 2016. It also claimed to have enrolled more than 5,000 merchants in India, with expansion plans across 11 cities and 50,000 deals by the same time. Chopra and Mani will continue to build the Zovi platform as well.
Top level hires
Earlier this week, Little appointed Amisha Sethi as its chief marketing officer. As the CMO, Sethi will be in charge of brand building, customer acquisition and building a marketing team. The company also appointed Wishy Arora as its VP of products and Suraj Panigrahy as VP of sales and merchant acquisition.
Paytm’s entry into hyperlocal services
Note that Paytm, one of Little’s investors, which raised an undisclosed amount in fresh funding from Alibaba and Ant Financial last month, is set to enter the hyperlocal services vertical, starting with food ordering, table bookings, cinema tickets and deals in the user’s neighbourhood. The company mentioned that it has entered into partnership with companies like BookMyShow and Zomato to provide these services. Little will partner with Paytm for payments through its platform, while conversely offering all the deals available on Paytm.
Competition:
– JustDial’s Search Plus app, which was to be launched this month, will offer 24 integrated services as a part of a suite on one platform. The app was to be launched for both Android and iOS, would allow for users to look up local restaurants, spas, hotels, taxis, bus tickets, consultants, car rentals, cleaning services etc.
– Times Internet-owned CouponDunia launched an in-store, hyperlocal couponing system where users would be able to buy items in offline stores using CouponDunia’s coupons in categories like apparel, footwear, accessories, home decor, electronics and gaming among others. The company also had plans to launch grocery coupons.
– In December last year, Wirkle co-founder Sunil Goyal launched a services marketplace called Near.in. Then, the marketplace was limited to service providers from Gurgaon across categories like Home Needs (home services, architects & interior designers) Health & Wellness (dieticians, physiotherapists and zumba classes) and Events (photographers, makeup artists, tattoo artists, event planners).
Image Credit: Flickr user Mike Mozart
