Indian business conglomerate Reliance Industries, owned by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, has bought a 85% majority stake in Indian startup NowFloats. The startup aims to help new businesses develop an online presence without web developing skills. Reliance acquired the stake through Reliance Strategic Business Ventures Limited, for $20 million.
NowFloats is a Hyderabad based platform that helps new businesses develop an online presence without much hassle. With the help of NowFloats, any small scale business can easily have a website, engage with their customers on Whatsapp and create a full suite of digital presence for itself.
Before this investment, the startup had raised about $12 million in various rounds and claims to have served 300,000 retail partners. The platform also acquired LookUp last year, which is a chat service that connects consumers to local businesses.
NowFloats currently offers two products, depending on the size of business it is catering to. There is ‘Boost360’, a 360 degree suite of digital products for small and medium businesses. The other one is called ‘Kistue’ and is an advanced technology suite meant for large enterprises, looking to develop and deploy applications to the cloud, without much of back-end development skills. Kitsue helps developers by providing a simple HTML based syntax to build any kind of serverless / cloud-native app.
Reliance has big plans for the startup as it aims to invest upto $10.6 million more to acquire a total of 89.66% in the company if certain unspecified goals are met by the end of the next year.
The acquisition also sits well within Reliance’s overall digital business strategy. The company is already gearing up for the launch of a full-fledged e-commerce platform, which is anticipated to be bigger in size than what Flipkart and Amazon India have achieved till now. The company already has a full suite of digital products, like its music and video streaming service under Jio Telecom and suite of apps under the Jio brand name. In a statement, Reliance Industries said the investment will “further enable the group’s digital and new commerce initiatives.”
India is a big market for small scale industries. Millions of people around the country are self employed and own small scale businesses. Many of these have gone online in the past years thanks to the cheap rates of data, brought in via aggressive pricing by Reliance-owned telecom operator, Jio. Cheap smartphones have also paved the way for the average Indian to conduct business online.
However, a vast majority of this market is still offline and many companies are looking to tap into this opportunity. Reliance’s move to acquire stake in NowFloats, coupled with its mega e-commerce venture will perhaps the biggest bet to acquire that offline market.
