Indian ecommerce war moves to the data front: Snapdeal buys Silicon Valley startup

Adtech is one of the most convoluted spaces, filled with acronyms (DSPs, SSPs, etc.) and fast-changing models (networks, exchanges, etc.). This gets even more complex in a vast, emerging, mobile-first market like India.

Ecommerce sites in particular have been struggling to figure out how to get the biggest bang for their buck from their ad budgets. The numbers of clicks or app installs are no longer relevant. What matters is to track and serve the quality users.

This is the context in which Snapdeal today announced the acquisition of Silicon Valley adtech startup Reduce Data. Founded by entrepreneur Asif Ali in California in 2012, its proprietary tech uses artificial intelligence and real-time data to increase the return on investment for advertising campaigns. The Reduce Data team will join Snapdeal to build discovery products for the seller community. “Asif comes with 17 years of experience in building web scale technologies,” says Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal, emphasizing the need to strengthen the data capabilities of the marketplace.

User tracking across devices, real time insights, and retargeting to increase purchases are becoming more important by the day in the highly competitive ecommerce space in India. We recently reported how Snapdeal’s main rival Flipkart tasked German adtech firm Glispa with increasing exposure to its Android app, and focusing more on loyal users who generate results.

See: Alibaba now has 2 weapons in India for a proxy war with Amazon

Snapdeal’s acquisitions so far

Asif joins a growing band of entrepreneurs who have come aboard Snapdeal via acquisitions – they include the founders of Freecharge, Exclusively.in, LetsGoMo, Martmobi (Shopo), and Rupeepower.

Founded by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal in February 2010, Snapdeal was one of first to take a sharp pivot from a daily deals site to an ecommerce marketplace. That pivot turned out to be a clincher as the company quickly raced to the top of the ecommerce pile in India, along with Flipkart and Amazon.

In the last couple of years, it has has been on an acquisition spree, gobbling up 11 companies so far to build up an ecommerce ecosystem faster than its rivals.

Here are all its trophies, in reverse chronological order:

• Reduce Data

• Shopo: This marketplace for artisanl goods was acquired in May 2013 and relaunched as an app-only, zero-commission marketplace last in July 2015.