Online food delivery start-up Swiggy has made its first acqui-hire in the deep technology space through an AI start-up Kint.io for an undisclosed amount. As part of this, the founding team of Kint.io will join Swiggy.
The Bengaluru-headquartered company, which is also foraying into the hyperlocal delivery space, said that the team at Kint.io will join Swiggy to boost its computer vision technology and elevate consumer experience.
The acqui-hire development comes just a few months after the company closed its mammoth funding round of $1 billion, which was led by Naspers and saw participation from China’s Tencent Holdings. The round saw Swiggy’s valuation shoot up to $3.3 billion. The company had been on the lookout to close a few acquisitions following the funding round.
“This acqui-hire is part of Swiggy’s strategy to scale our tech prowess by bringing in entrepreneurial teams that can solve unique customer problems, while leveraging the network and resources at Swiggy,” said Dale Vaz, head of engineering and data sciences at Swiggy. “The focus has never been more intense on building industry-changing technology in AI and other areas,” Vaz added.
Founded in 2014 by Pavithra Solai Jawahar and Jagannathan Veeraraghavan, Kint.io applies deep learning and computer vision to object recognition in video. Prior to this, Swiggy had made an acquisition in the food-delivery space through a buyout of on-demand delivery start-up Scootsy in August.
As consumer internet companies in India are growing and raising money, importance is being given to building a more robust technology stack for an enhanced experience.
In August, Flipkart acquired AI-led speech recognition start-up Liv.ai as they looked at elevating consumer experience of the next 200 million shoppers. Following this, the Walmart-backed company also acquired Upstream, an analytics company from Israel, in a bid to deliver real-time pricing and product analytics to the platform’s sellers.
Source: Mint