Deals app Little acquires beauty & wellness startup Stylofie

Little Internet Pvt Ltd, which owns the deals discovery app Little, has acquired beauty and wellness startup Stylofie for an undisclosed amount.

Little aims to further penetrate the beauty and wellness segment with this acquisition. "With this acquisition, Little will get access to more than 50,000 registered visitors and over 1,000 merchants on the Stylofie platform," it said in a press statement.

This is Little's second acquisition. It had acquired Chandigarh-based curated deals marketplace Trideal in October 2015.

A curated online marketplace for salons and spas, Stylofie provides a platform to consumers to discover and compare salons and spas, check reviews, and make bookings and payments. Owned and operated by Soulmo Solutions Pvt Ltd, the startup had raised $250,000 (about Rs 1.65 crore) in seed funding from Hong Kong-based Swastika Company Ltd in November 2015. It operates in Bangalore, Delhi and Gurgaon.

Following the acquisition, the Stylofie team will be joining Little and will be based out of Little's Gurgaon office.

Stylofie was founded by Saurav Dey, Prateek Agarwal and Balaji Srinivasan in mid-2015. While Dey has worked with Genpact, Accenture Technology Solutions and Ingersoll-Rand in the past, Agarwal, a CA, previously worked with Videocon, CSG, Bharti Airtel and Ranbaxy. Srinivasan was associated with Genpact before launching Stylofie.

Dey will be joining Little while the other two founders, Agarwal and Srinivasan, will be exiting to explore other opportunities, the company said. According to Srinivasan's LinkedIn profile, he has joined as chief customer officer at logistics technology solutions firm FarEye.

Little, which counts fashion e-tailer Zovi.com's founders Manish Chopra and Satish Mani as promoters, is a mobile marketplace for deals from offline merchants. It covers restaurants, movies, hotels, salons, gyms, spas and other services. It currently claims to have over 25,000 merchants across 15 cities offering over 50,000 live deals across F&B, movies, last-minute hotels, and health & wellness.

Little had raised $50 million (Rs 318 crore) in July from One97Communications, which runs mobile payments venture Paytm, SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management, among others, in July 2015.

In January 2016, the company raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC Pvt Ltd.