Paytm accelerates mobile commerce, to acquire deal discovery mobile app ‘Little’

Home-grown digital commerce and payments company Paytm is planning to acquire Little, a hyperlocal deals marketplace in the online to offline space (O2O), one of its portfolio companies.

Paytm has already had early-stage talks with the founders, and there is an indication of SAIF Partners was playing a key role in the negotiations, reported VCCircle. Paytm sees Little as a platform that would help it accelerate its mobile commerce and transactions.

Earlier, Little had raised $50M funding led by Paytm along with a large new undisclosed investor and participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management.

Little Internet Pvt Ltd is run by Manish Chopra and Satish Mani, both of whom co-founded online fashion brand Zovi. Both Chopra and Mani continue to run Zovi, which is also backed by SAIF and Tiger Global.

Little, a mobile app-only platform, provides real-time hyperlocal deals to customers across services like restaurants, movies, hotels, salons, gyms and spas.

For merchants, it acts as a sales platform they can use to gain intelligence about customers in the vicinity, send timely notifications and offer relevant deals.

In the past, Paytm-backed Little had made a string of acquisitions. It acquired Chandigarh-based curated deals marketplace Trideal in October 2015 and online salon marketplace Stylofie in January, this year.

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Besides Little, Paytm has invested in start-ups such as SaaS-based logistics company LogiNext, auto-rickshaw aggregator Jugnoo, AbhiBus, ClearTax , TapChief, RainingClouds, Xpressbees, and EduKart, including several others.

Mobile data analytics venture Mobiquest was the latest to be added in paytm’s portfolio list. Its m’loyal platform provides loyalty, analytics and campaign management solutions to over 200 brands and over 80 million consumers across sectors such as retail, food and beverage, fashion, malls, and hospitality.

Paytm has been on a multi-pronged expansion drive, foraying into travel booking, movie-ticketing and other areas that align with its core competence of payments.

Little: Website