Ten-month-old Jugnoo buys older startups to take on Ola and Uber in India

India’s Jugnoo, a ten-month-old startup that has apps for both auto rickshaw rides and food delivery, announced it acquired Bistro Offers, a restaurant discovery app and Yelo, a services marketplace. The deal size of both the startups combined is said to be worth US$1 million in cash and stock.

With this acquisition, Jugnoo wants to strengthen its position in the hyperlocal space. Bistro, an eighteen month old startup, provides a DIY platform for broadcasting offers and managing loyalty for restaurants. The app helps build, execute, and monitor customer engagement and brand loyalty campaigns. Yelo, a one year old startup, offers a networking app for freelancers and part-timers.

Jugnoo runs three apps – Jugnoo Autos, Jugnoo Meals, and Jugnoo Fatafat. The Jugnoo Autos app, started in November 2014, is like Uber for auto rickshaw rides. The other service is Jugnoo Meals, launched in February, which offers home delivery of freshly home-cooked food with a rotational menu. The meals are cooked by Jugnoo’s in-house chefs and are delivered within 30 minutes of placing the order.

Jugnoo launched Jugnoo Fatafat in April, a hyperlocal ecommerce marketplace for home delivery of fresh groceries.

“Between Jugnoo, Bistro, and Yelo, we offer complementary products and there is potential for significant synergies,” says Samar Singla, co-founder and CEO of Jugnoo, an engineer from Indian Institute of Technology.

Samar is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded accelerator Click Labs, and Prodigy Foods, a venture focusing on providing organic poultry feed.

According to Samar, both the startups will continue to be independent products. “Our plan is to launch them in all the markets we are present in and then work on monetizing the traffic via Jugnoo offerings,” he says.

Earlier, Jugnoo acquired cab aggregator BookMyCab to enter the taxi aggregator space in bigger cities like Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Bangalore, and Pune. After the acquisition, Jugnoo managed to cross 10,000 daily transactions.

The startup secured US$5 million in seed funding from Snow Leopard and PayTM three months ago.

Jugnoo competes with heavily-funded homegrown taxi app Ola which also entered the grocery delivery and food ordering space. It’s also up against global giant Uber.