Carousell, a mobile commerce platform for the operations of classifieds marketplace, after the recent acquisition of Malaysia-based personal safety app “Watch Over Me”, has announced again yet another acquisition. This time, it’s a Singapore-based used car marketplace known as Caarly.

Founded in 2014, Caarly’s operations are similar to Carousell wherein it is a mobile application which facilitates online trading. But the company, different from Carousell, instead focuses on cars. That is the application enables car dealers and individual sellers to use a smartphone app to take photos and list their cars on Caarly’s online marketplace. The enterprise currently boasts a partnership with more than 200 car dealers in the city-state.

The reason behind this acquisition is because the Singapore-based peer-to-peer marketplace noticed that there was an increase in users who were looking to sell and buy cars on the site.

Siu Rui Quek, the co-founder and CEO of Carousell, further elaborates the motive underpinning the acquisition, saying that “Carousell has grown over the last 4.5 years, and so have our users. Over 50 per cent of them in Singapore are now over 25 years old, and have significantly more purchasing power. We’ve seen how their evolving needs have resulted in more listings and greater demand in higher value verticals like cars.”

The terms of the deal are undisclosed. But the entire Caarly team will join Carousell, being positioned in the car classified vertical. Both applications will proceed as normal, as existing Caarly users can continue to use the Caarly platform to list their inventory with a simple 1-tap post to cross post to the car category on Carousell.

Acquiring Carrly will help Carousell improve its used car classifieds as well as bring car dealerships into its platform. The startup has plans to start releasing their used car listing from dealers in Singapore and eventually into its other markets. To date, the platform is currently available in 14 cities.

Additionally, Carousell has also made an announcement on Thursday that it has appointed former PropertyGuru managing director, Winnie Khoo as the general manager for its Singapore and Malaysia operations as well Rakesh Malani who is the former CFO of the Indian adtech firm Komli Media to join the team.

With this new development, of acquisition and new hires, it seems that the mobile classifieds platform strategy is moving towards implementing a sustainable monetization model.

For more information, please visit https://sg.carousell.com/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Zuri Group Global, a known luxury hospitality brand linked with the Karmani family, has forayed into the e-commerce industries in 2012 with the launch of an office supplies portal known as Zoffio.

Zoffio is a vertical business e-commerce platform that offers stationary, paper products, digital products, travel accessories, office utilities, corporate produces and customized products to SMEs and corporates.

Founded on December 1, Zoffio in its 4 year span since has been growing steadily to become India’s leading e-store for office supplies, claiming to have sold more than 3.3 million products in 2015 alone.

But reportedly by Techcircle, Zoffio has ceased its opperations in April this year.

Apparently, the office supplies e-commercial startup has exited the businesses being bought by a Chinese firm in Shenzen. The name of the company and the amount of acquisition was not disclosed.

According to sources, the company had decided to end its operations in February 2016 and was completely shut down by April. The 200 existing Zoffio employees were given a three months of notice period and the management assisted some in finding new jobs. A few of the employees from the admin and technology teams have been retained and absorbed into the Zuri Group.

This decision made by the parent company was due to their inability to raise sufficient external capital to accelerate the growth of the startup as well as their disinterest in pumping more capital which ultimately led to the move to sell the entity.

Having purchased Zoffio, the Shenzhen-based firm is planning to enter India in 2017 with a similar business model.

About Zoffio
Zoffio.com is an e-commerce company based in Bangalore, India which focuses on stationery and office supplies. The firm is a part of Zuri Group Global and is built on the sole aim of organizing the office supplies industry in India, which is otherwise highly unorganized. To date, Zoffio caters to more than 5000 corporates and SMEs for their office needs.

For more information, please visit http://www.zoffio.com/

Tuplejump, a Hyderabad-based startup with the vision to simplify data engineering recently became the third machine learning expertise acquired by Apple.

Founded in 2013, Tuplejump was helping major companies to stock, process and visualize their data using its unique in-house software, with most operations from both India and United States. But what caught Apple’s eye was Tuplejump’s on-going project called “FiloDB”.

Turns out FiloDB is an open source project working to enable the automation of data pattern recognition without being explicitly programmed. More specifically, the project aims to build a program that can efficiently apply machine learning concepts and analytics to the massive amount of complex data as they streamed in.

After the acquisition, Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, two of the three co-founders moved to work with Apple in May while the third co-founder Deepak Alur left to join Anaplan, a planning and performance management platform for businesses.

According to Business Insider, the purchase price was not disclosed though it is said to be lower than Apple’s last machine learning purchase, Seattle-based Turi Inc. which was purchased at the price of US$200 million earlier August this year.

Collin Johnson, a spokesperson for Apple, made their usual standard non-denial statement when questioned by TechCrunch regarding the acquisition saying that, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Nevertheless, Apple currently has their sights set on artificial intelligence, looking to expand into the machine learning industry. As along with Tuplejump, the iPhone maker has to date acquired three machine learning startups including Turi, a company that builds end-to-end intelligent applications in Python and Emotient, a company that uses artificial intelligence to recognize, analyze and respond to facial expressions.

In a globalized world, markets are increasingly interconnected but often there is a barrier to these expanding markets, and that is language. Thus, language translators are needed all around the world.

Taking advantage of this need, is a business called Conyac which mediates social translation services between bilinguals and companies. In other words, it is a platform to crowdsource and recruit translators for translation projects provided by businesses.

Founded by Naoki Yamada in February 2009, Conyac is named after the special konjac jelly in the popular Japanese animation called “Doraemon”. It is a special tool that gives characters the ability to speak and understand any languages after consumption.

Building on that, the site aims to gather native translators from all over the world. Since its launch in 2009, Conyac’s base of translators has grown to 10,000 individuals around the world who work in 60 different languages. Prices range from $3 per translation to a $100 per month packages, and clients usually get their completed projects back within an hour.

Additionally, what sets Conyac apart from its competitors is its high quality translation work. This is achieved through its system of project evaluation whereby Conyac has an evaluation system between translators to maintain quality.

On August 2016, Yamada sold his crowd translation service, Conyac to Rozetta, a language learning service provider for US$14 million. The deal with Japan-based Rozetta worked out to a 50 percent in cash and 50 percent in stock swap.

In response to this, Naoki Yamada, founder of Conyac explained that “This is just a way and tool to grow the business. IPO is also a tool, as well as acquisition. You should take the option that works for your company.”

Naoki hopes to see more buy-outs in Japan and looks forward to the day when acquisitions the size of his company wouldn’t even make headlines. Naoki said in an interview with Tech In Asia.

About Conyac
Founded in 2009 and based in Japan, Conyac is a global platform for crowdsourced translation services. It acts as a platform for social translation network, matching skillful translators with businesses and users who require translation services.

For more information, please visit https://conyac.cc/en

Contact Info
Name: Vivian
Organization: Unicorn Media