Go-Jek acquires another Indian startup – this time in healthcare

A Go-Jek driver with passenger. Photo credit: Go-Jek.

Indonesia’s on-demand services unicorn Go-Jek has bought another Bangalore-based tech company, the Economic Times of India reports.

The latest addition to the family is Pianta, a healthcare startup founded last year by former Ola and Flipkart executives Swaminathan Seetharaman, Ganesh Subramanian, and Nitin Agarwal.

Pianta facilitates discovery and appointment booking with healthcare providers who do home visits. Services include physical therapy, nursing, and lab sample collection.

Getting into healthcare

Go-Jek has grown into a juggernaut of services at its home market, Indonesia. It started as an on-demand motorcycle ride-hailing app for personal transportation and then branched out to other services. It also offers house cleaning, massages, and shopping assistance, and runs its own e-payment system Go-Pay.

The startup previously made baby steps toward healthcare services like medicine delivery by investing in Indonesian healthtech startup HaloDoc. However, it hasn’t rolled out any features to the public yet based on that deal.

Acquiring tech teams

Go-Jek previously acquired two Indian startups to enhance its tech muscle, and it’s possible this latest acquisition follows a similar pattern.

After the acquisition became public today, Pianta’s website was disabled and reads “We are now part of the Go-Jek family.”

It looks like Pianta is discontinuing its development for India and working on products for the Indonesian market instead.

“Pianta’s core team comes from Ola and Flipkart and their expertise in the logistics and payments sector is well aligned with our goals and what we are planning to achieve in the coming quarters,” Sidu Ponnappa, managing director of Go-Jek’s engineering division in India, told the Economic Times of India.

Some of Pianta’s services overlap with HaloDoc’s – for example, the lab sample collection at home. Its acquisition could be intended to speed up the integration of some of HaloDoc’s services with Go-Jek, or Pianta could be developing its own set of healthcare features.

We’ve reached out to Pianta and Go-Jek for comment.