Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
grab

Grab, a South Asian ride-hailing startup, which has also entered the “unicorn” club, has acquired Bangalore-based IKaaz, which focuses on mobile payments solution. However, the company has not yet acquired financial details related to the deal.

As a part of this acquisition deal, the team at iKaaz will now join Grab’s Bengaluru research centre to work on feature development and partner integration of GrabPay — Grab’s payments platform. It’s noteworthy that Grab is not offering its services in India but has just established a development centre in India.

In a statement regarding this acquisition, Grab said:

iKaaz’s technology was built to work in India’s challenging internet conditions and enable effortless and fast payments for thousands of merchants… This flexibility and scalability make it ideally suited for Southeast Asia’s diverse payments landscape and large unbanked population.

iKaaz, which offers an NFC-based (near field communication) mobile payments platform, was founded in the year 2012 by Soma Sundaram. The tap-and-pay solution works through the company’s point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and mobile app called Mowa, which doubles up as a mobile wallet for peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant transactions.

GrabPay’s Southeast Asia managing director Jason Thompson in a statement:

iKaaz’ technology has served merchants and partners across different industries and in different settings, from parking lots and airports to retail stores and hotels. This rich set of offline payments feature offers the flexibility needed to tailor our GrabPay platform to each country and partner in Southeast Asia. We look forward to leveraging the expertise of iKaaz’ leadership team and build GrabPay into SEA’s universal payments platform together.

iKaaz’s list of clientele includes Café Coffee Day, Domino’s, Subway, More, Chai Point, among others. On the other hand, Grab, which was valued at $6 billion in its latest round, operates in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia.

By Jeet