Snapdeal acquires ex-Amazon techie's predictive marketing technology firm TargetingMantra

E-commerce giant Snapdeal on Thursday announced the acquisition of TargetingMantra, a boutique technology startup, the operates in the field of personalising shopping experience for e-commerce customers. Going forward TargetingMantra’s team will further the on-going initiative to build the ‘customer experience engine’ at Snapdeal, to personalise the shopping experience for customers.  

Story so far 

Founded by Saurabh Nangia and Rahul Singh in March 2013, TargetingMantra expanded to provide more than 15 personalisation solutions by December 2013. The startup's founders come with rich experience in machine learning and e-commerce - having previously worked at Amazon.

Currently operating out of offices in Palo Alto and Gurgaon, TargetingMantra provides a unified platform to manage customer life cycle through personalisation, targeting and big data analytics. The startup specialises in building products for enhancing customer buying journey and increasing conversion rates through intuitive product discovery, recommendations and channel selection.

In September 2014, TargetingMantra, announced that it had raised a $1.1 million funding round from three investors — 500Startups, Nexus Venture Partners and One97 Mobility Fund. At this stage they also got technology stalwarts such as Rajan Anandan, MD Google India, Ankur Wariko, head of Groupon Asia-Pacific and Gaurav Agarwal, former Farmville MD on their advisory board.

Speaking about this acquisition, Rohit Bansal, Co-founder, Snapdeal said,

Personalisation is a key piece which helps consumers discover and transact in a fast, frictionless and intuitive manner. The Targeting Mantra team comes with valuable experience in driving superior customer experience through machine learning. We are thrilled to have them join us on our journey towards achieving 20 million daily transacting users by 2020.

Rahul, Co-founder, TargetingMantra added, “We are looking forward to rolling out our solutions to Snapdeal’s huge customer base.”

Sector overview

The Indian e-commerce industry is likely to be worth $38 billion by 2016, a 67 per cent jump over the $23 billion revenues for 2015. Another report from BCG estimates that e-commerce will be a $40-50 billion by 2020, with electronics accounting for about 30 per cent of it.

As e-commerce grows, end consumers have a wide variety of platforms and niche players to choose and purchase from. Implementing predictive marketing and personalisation, will help e-commerce players stand out from their competitors and get repeat orders. A recent report from Forrester, estimates that  companies that used predictive analytics were 2.9 per cent more likely to see revenue growth and nearly 2 per cent more likely to meet or exceed sales goals.

It will be interesting to see how Snapdeal leverages TargetingMantra, as it fights the e-commerce wars against Amazon, Flipkart and other niche players.