GO-JEK, the Indonesian ride-hailing giant, after (probably!?) reaching a peak in motorbike taxi aggregation is now turning towards healthcare space for expansion. The company has today announced the acquisition of Bengaluru-based Pianta, an online marketplace for home healthcare services. The financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.
The acquisition of the Indian startup will help GO-JEK bolster its foray into the healthcare sector, where they’re now looking to launch an on-demand delivery service. Though the company isn’t operational in the country, it has a core engineering team seated in Bengaluru.
Post acquisition, Pianta’s eight member team will merge with the aformentioned engineering team to assist in the seamless expansion of its Asian operations. The company is planning to double its existing India headcount of seventy employees in the coming months. It is also actively looking for talent for key operations like data science, mobile, security and DevOps for its office in Bengaluru and Singapore.
India has a great pool of technology and product development minds. The Bangalore office plays a strategic role in accessing talent for us across all spheres of product delivery, development, architecture and user experience, quality control
GO-JEK is moving to launch an on-demand health care product which might have on demand delivery and logistics’ issues, which is where Pianta forte is.
says Sidu Ponnappa, MD of GO-JEK Engineering India.
Pianta, run by SLX Logistics Pvt. Ltd., was launched by a trio of former Flipkart and Ola execs, namely Swaminathan Seetharaman, Ganesh Subramanian and Nitin Agarwal in 2015. Their mission is to connect trusted home health care providers with consumers and create a compelling experience for consumers/healthcare providers.
Using a simple mobile app, the company allows consumers to book home visits for physiotherapy, nursing and lab sample collection, all in realtime with the health providers. Earlier this year, the company closed an undisclosed seed round with participation from Freecharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon.
Commenting on the Pianta team, Ponnappa says,
Pianta’s core team comes from Ola and Flipkart and their expertise in the logistics and payments sector is well aligned with our goals and what we are planning to achieve in the coming quarters.
Swaminathan Seetharaman, CEO and co-founder of Pianta, is also elated to partner with Indonesian ride-hailing ginat and adds that the two companies(or executives) met through mutual friends and realised GO-JEK’s interest in their domain expertise. He also goes on to add,
GO-JEK provides us with a great opportunity to leverage the capabilities that we at Pianta have built in the domain of on-demand delivery and logistics. It presents us with a large canvas to create a much larger impact and to create it faster.
Go-JEK, the fastest courier, transport, and shopping service in Indonesia was founded in 2010 by a trio of founders. Started as an aggregator, the company has a network of over two lakh motorbike taxis, known as ‘ojeks’ in its fleet. It has now diversified into food, grocery and even courier delivery service but is now looking to add on-demand medicine delivery ‘GoMed‘ to its service as well. For the same, it has recently invested in Indonesian health-tech startup HaloDoc, which allows patients to connect with doctors via a mobile app.
In a bid to rival Uber and expand its current delivery network, GO-JEK has added a fresh $550 million to its coffers. The funding round was led by new investors, KKR, Warburg Pincus, Farallon Capital and Capital Group Private Markets, while multiple exisiting investors Sequoia India, Northstar Group, DST Global, NSI Ventures, Rakuten Ventures and Formation Group also participated for a larger chunk of the company.
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