Arch rivals Flipkart and Amazon come up with strategies day-by-day, in order to surpass the competition and stand as number one in the market.
In consideration to the fact, the domestic e-commerce giant, Flipkart is looking to invest $25 million (Rs 160 crore) in Silicon Valley to upgrade its technology heap by focusing on deep technology, a report in a financial daily said.
Such expansion comes over a month after the E commerce firm created an Internal Al unit known as AlforIndia. It is reported that the Bengaluru based business is keen to invest such a huge amount in at least one artificial intelligence (AI) startup based in Silicon Valley.
“They (Flipkart) are looking at tech acquisitions in the valley because differentiated tech is a new focus area for the company. The idea is to bring these Indian tech founders from the US who can bring deep technology capabilities that don’t exist in India.” a person close to the development explained.
He also mentioned that the technology infrastructure of Flipkart is not as good as the Jeff Bezos’s company.
Its a known fact that the business giants are in battle since a long time for their products and services. As amazon is a global business, flipkart has been trying to catch up with it, in terms of technology and innovation. Despite of trying, Flipkart is lagging behind Amazon since past three years.
A report suggested that the AlforIndia will be led by chief data scientist Mayur Datar alongside chairman and co-founder Sachin Bansal and chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy. Talking about Al unit in an interview with Livemint, the co-founder and chairman of Flipkart, Sachin Bansal said “This is the next big thing for us, where we are betting big on the use of AI and machine learning to solve problems at Flipkart. India’s problems are unique and we need to apply AI in the ecosystem to solve Indian problems.
We believe that some of the focus areas for AI in developed countries cannot be applied for India. At Flipkart, we will solve problems differently because the underlying problems (in India) are different.”
Previously in 2015, Flipkart had acquired the F7 Labs in the Silicon Valley to focus on AI and machine learning.