Flipkart acquires Israel-based Upstream Commerce

Flipkart, India’s largest ecommerce marketplace, has strengthened its innovation capabilities with the acquisition of Israel-based Upstream Commerce.

The Israel’s startups build cloud-based, automated competitive pricing and product analysis solutions.

Flipkart in a statement said Upstream Commerce will strengthen the company's ability to deliver insights to its sellers, helping them optimise their product assortment and pricing strategies and find gaps in the market to serve customers better.

Post the acquisition, the Upstream Commerce team will continue to work out of Israel and will become a part of Flipkart and become Flipkart’s one of the many global centers for future data science work.

The valuation of the acquisitions is not revealed. The acquisition is in line with Flipkart’s vision to solve ecommerce challenges through technology innovations- both through in house efforts as well as inorganic route, and will help provide wider selection and better pricing for Flipkart customers.

"With this acquisition, we will now have tech and talent presence across Asia, US and Israel, some of the key global hubs for innovation,” said Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy.

He said in the past decade Flipkart has not only pushed for ecommerce growth in India but has also solved quintessential Indian problems through technology innovations.

"With the Upstream acquisition, we will now have tech and talent presence across Asia, US and Israel, some of the key global hubs for innovation. The team at Upstream Commerce is highly talented and as we welcome them to Flipkart we are also looking forward to making Israel one of our excellence centres to do cutting edge data science work,” said Krishnamurthy.

Upstream Commerce CEO Amos Peleg said the company is excited to become a part of India’s largest ecommerce player.

"During our discussion, as we got to know more about Flipkart, we realised that we share the same passion for technology, and the same vision for the contribution of data science to the future and success of online retail," he said.

Peleg said the choice and vision of Flipkart to establish its presence in Israel through acquiring Upstream Commerce is a significant vote of confidence in the company’s team, technology and domain expertise.

Upstream Commerce was backed by Y L Ventures as a leading investor from its inception to acquisition. Avendus Capital was the financial advisor to Upstream Commerce.