ShopClues closes the acquisition of mobile payments app, Momoe

ShopClues, India’s first and largest managed marketplace, believes in keeping pace with the emerging trends in the e-commerce space by adopting a proactive approach. The recent move of acquiring Bengaluru-based mobile payments platform, Momoe, is in tune with this strategy. The development is a successful culmination of ShopClues’ plans of bringing innovative digital payments for its merchants and customers on its platform. Thanks to this acquisition, the portal will now use Momoe’s technology to boost its payment network for merchants and will look to tie this in its hyperlocal commerce business.

The ever-increasing Internet penetration and adoption of smartphones in India has created a ready ground for an app like Momoe to flourish. As a mobile payments app, Momoe allows users to pay offline merchants like restaurants, grocery stores, electronics, pharmacies, spas, salons and the like. Using the app, customers can pay for products and services using credit cards, debit cards, net banking and mobile wallets. Founded by Utkarsh Biradar, Karthik Vaidyanathan, Ganesh Balakrishnan, Neelesh Bam and Aiman Ashraf, the venture had raised $1.2 million in seed funding in December 2014 from three investors – IDG Ventures, Jungle Ventures and India Quotient. Momoe was first in the offline payments space by providing a cashless shopping, commuting and eating out experience to their users.

ShopClues’ acquisition of Momoe is aimed towards enabling & empowering its merchants. Talking about the strategic acquisition, Sanjay Sethi CEO & Cofounder, ShopClues said, “In Momoe’s team we found the right technological & ideological match to take us much closer to our vision of making our consumer payments frictionless and providing our merchant’s with mobile banking solutions to digitize their businesses.”

Adding to the comment, Utkarsh Biradar, CEO, Momoe said, “ShopClues is just the right anchor for expanding our digital payments proposition. We see natural synergies since Shopclues is a pure marketplace model with a strong focus on merchants and consumer segments that significantly overlap with Momoe. We will continue our focus on innovative merchant solutions, extending our payments proposition to a broader array of merchant services for online and offline commerce. WE will also build on emerging payment methods such as IMPS and UPI to bring a hassle free shopping experience to consumers”

While there was interest from multiple e-commerce and payments players, the leadership at Momoe found a strong culture fit with ShopClues