In line with its earlier commitment of investing close to a $150 Million in acquiring new age companies, Alibaba-backed Paytm has today announced the acquisition of Shifu — a smart consumer behaviour prediction platform — in a deal reportedly valued at $8 Million.
While not much has been revealed on the financial front, the deal will see Shifu’s entire 20 member team joining Paytm. The startup had earlier secured a seed round from a few angel investors.
With close to 500K downloads on the Play Store, Shifu is a smart task managing app which mines user data on numerous fronts — smartphone usage data, location, time and other elements — and then comes up with relevant predictions of tasks a user can perform for better usage.
Think of Shifu as a smart task/ To Do list which learns from your usage pattern, anticipates your need and surface right apps, contacts, information, tasks to you without you having to search them in phone .
In a prepared statement, Kiran Vasi Reddy, Senior VP (Business) at Paytm, told TOI
Shifu’s data and tools to predict consumer preferences and behaviour are very useful for a company like ours. We can serve a consumer in a more personalized and intimate way.
The app houses numerous features — Call Forecast, Location Identification, Missed Call Alerts, Automatic Cloud sync etc. While most features like app suggestions, battery usage alerts, data alerts etc are available in similar apps, Shifu’s Call forecasting and locaton identification features are a stand-out.
With the former, the app identifies your home and office to bring out the contacts whom you mostly call when at home and office. Shifu will bring out these contacts to the notification bar for quick access. And with the latter, Shifu will learn about your home and office locations and ask to confirm it. Once the location is approved by you, Shifu will customize alerts based on your home and office.
For Paytm, this will be its third significant investment into emerging companies, from the $150Mn it plans to invest over the coming years. The Alibaba-backed payments-to-everything company had earlier snapped up Near.in for close to $2 million while investing a significant amount in auto-booking app Jugnoo.
