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In January, ShopClues had raised an undisclosed amount in Series E round of funding led by GIC and entered the billion dollar club

ShopClues, a leading managed online marketplace in India and a member of India’s US$1 billion club, has acquired Bangalore-based mobile payments platform Momoe for an undisclosed amount.

The e-commerce firm will now use Momoe’s technology to boost its payment network for merchants and will look to tie this in its hyperlocal commerce business.

Momoe’s introduction on the platform will ease the interaction between the vendors on the app and the consumers, ShopClues said in a statement. This is in sync with ShopClues’ inclusion of a chat feature that enables consumers to connect directly with the merchants on the platform.

Sanjay Sethi CEO and Co-founder of ShopClues said: “In Momoe’s team, we found the right technological and 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 digitise their businesses.”

ShopClues was founded in 2011 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sandeep Aggarwal. Unlike other marketplaces, which tend to focus on mobile, electronics, computers and branded fashion, ShopClues mainly focusses on unstructured categories.

The firm claims to have more than 190 million monthly visitors on its website, with 50 million listed products and over 500,000-plus merchants. It has over 1,000 employees.

In January this year, ShopClues had raised an undisclosed amount in Series E round of funding led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. With this, the Gurgaon-based firm had joined the billion dollar club, with a US$1.1 billion valuation.

Founded by Utkarsh Biradar, Karthik Vaidyanathan, Ganesh Balakrishnan, Neelesh Bam and Aiman Ashraf, Momoe is a mobile payment startup that allows users to pay offline merchants like restaurants, grocery stores, electronics, pharmacies, spas, and salons. Using the app, customers can pay for products and services using credit cards, debit cards, net banking and mobile wallets.

The venture had raised US$1.2 million in seed funding in December 2014 from IDG Ventures, Jungle Ventures and India Quotient.

“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,” said Biradar.

The post Indian e-commerce ‘Unicorn’ ShopClues acquires Momoe to boost its payment network for merchants appeared first on e27.

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