Snapdeal acquires Silicon Valley-based Reduce Data to build discovery products for its seller community

Online marketplace Snapdeal announced its acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Reduce Data on Wednesday for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was to build on the discovery platform and associated tools for brands and sellers in their marketplace.

This is Snapdeal’s 11th acquisition. The e-commerce biggie had raised its second biggest round of investments worth $500 million last month.

Having customers across the US, the UK and India, Reduce Data’s focus is to assist brands and advertisers through leveraging artificial intelligence, real-time data and other tools. This will assist the sellers of Snapdeal to retarget users with custom ads tailored to individual visitors, as well as get real time data on their impressions to provide better ROI (Return of Investment).

Commenting on the partnership Asif Ali, CEO of Reduce Data, said,

“Snapdeal has grown at a phenomenal pace in the last few years. We look forward to building world class technology products at Snapdeal and setting new benchmarks for the industry in this space.”

While Rohit Bansal, Co-Founder of Snapdeal, said,

“Asif comes with 17 years of rich experience in building web scale technologies, product management and building highly specialized teams focused on a data platform and ad tech products. We are confident that Asif and his team will further strengthen our technological capabilities.”

In the past two years, Snapdeal’s acquisitions were focussed on just mobile with the medium being one the biggest growth drivers, according to the company. With over 75 per cent of the firm’s sales coming from the same, it is interesting to see what path Snapdeal’s newer acquisitions will pave for the company.

YourStory Take – What does this acquisition mean?

This year Snapdeal is investing heavily to spruce up its tech, and has hired key people, including Anand Chandrasekaran to lead its product. Last month, the Alibaba-backed company had floated FindMyStyle and rolled out commission free mobile marketplace Shopo. This acquisition will enhance Snapdeal’s data mining capability and will essentially empower sellers to retarget users with customised ads to consumers.

Snapdeal has the largest seller base and it has been announcing a slew of initiatives to improve seller’s ROI. Besides technological upliftment, the Gurgaon-based company had launched Capital Assist in August last year and so far enabled more than 150 sellers to raise over $8 million (Rs 50 crores) through the initiative.

With the industry still being driven majorly by discounts and size of marketing budgets, how the sellers leverage this technology to their advantage can be refreshing to see. Moreover, from the Delhi-based online marketplace, this doesn’t come as a surprise since it is known for acquiring to speed up its growth, right from its early days.

(With inputs from Jai Vardhan)