Mobile wallet and e-commerce firm Paytm has acquired consumer behaviour prediction and recommendation platform Shifu, to enhance customer experience on its platform.
Delhi-based Shifu, run by Signal Inc., mines the smartphone usage patterns of users and makes personalised recommendations to them. The 20-member team at Shifu, including founders Prashant Singh, Deepansh Jain and Michael Massey, will join Paytm, said an official statement by Paytm.
Paytm didn’t disclose any financial details of the acquistion. However, as per media reports, the deal is worth USD8 million (Rs 53 crore).
“Shifu has been quite popular as an intelligent task-managing application. By integrating their technology and behavioural modelling with Paytm app, we will be able to offer a highly intuitive and personalised experience to our users,” Kiran Vasireddy, senior vice-president at Paytm said.
“This acquisition will give further impetus to our focus on Artificial Intelligence. By predicting user behaviour based on past usage, location and other data points, our platform will be able to offer relevant recommendations to our users,” he added.
Shifu is a free task-managing app. Once the app is installed, it analyses the usage patterns of the device owner and makes a variety of suggestions based on a predictive algorithm.
This is Paytm’s second acquisition within a month. In early December, Paytm had acquired Near.in, a marketplace app that connects users with local businesses for home services, its first acquisition after it raised an undisclosed amount in fresh funding from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and existing investor Ant Financial three months ago.
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