It’s wedding between search and chat. NowFloats a business discovery services platform has acquired Lookup a chat service that connects consumers to local business. The amount of the deal is undisclosed.
The marriage is analogous to, perhaps, a Facebook and WhatsApp coming together to create a compelling platform for consumers and businesses said Jasminder Singh Gulati, Co-Founder/CEO of NowFloats.
The another significant reason for NowFloats to acquire Lookup was based on the findings of the NowFloats Digital Desh Drive which attempts to uncover ‘Inside the Internet of India” and thus the evolving consumer and business behaviors, he added.
Over the past year, NowFloats has conducted three research sprints across India (that includes driving across the country & meeting people), and it was clear that chat is one of the most pervasive behaviors’ followed by search and apps (latest report is here).
NowFloats is unlocking local business content, which is auto-prompted by our Relationship Intelligence Agent technology (a big-data mashup of website content, google trends, product catalogs, searches & consumer behaviors). Think about this as a very human front-end to a fairly deep machine-learning algorithm. This content is not only relevant but also frequently posted which attracts local consumers via search.
Lookup, on the other hand, has tapped into the global and pervasive behavior of chat. It already has an audience of 1.2M consumers and 90,000 businesses. Combine this with the NowFloats platform, which has a base of 2,50,000 businesses with over 6M consumers monthly, and you get a platform that taps into two of the most organic behaviors globally: Search and Chat.