Walmart Labs India acqui-hires micro-app startup Appsfly

The local product development division of US retail giant Walmart said on Monday that six employees of Appsfly.io, a startup which develops micro-apps, will come on board.

A person close to the development told TechCircle that the arrangement constituted an acqui-hire and that no money was exchanged. Walmart did not comment about this specific aspect.

Walmart Labs India said that the six Appsfly employees, which make up the majority of its team, will join Walmart Labs’ customer experience engineering team and will work on delivering a “wide range of engaging, consistent shopping experiences to Walmart’s customers."

Bengaluru-based Appsfly.io was founded in 2015 by Karthik Thirumalasetti, Akshay Kingar, Shashank Singh and Vijay Bhaskar Rao. Of the founders, only Thirumalasetti is joining Walmart Labs India. 

Appsfly has developed an advanced integration platform-as-a -service, built for connecting data sources, systems and businesses, to drive digital transformation.

“As a key market of growth and expansion, this is an important step we have taken in India," said Hari Vasudev, country head and vice president of technology at Walmart Labs India.

Walmart said that it was continuously bringing radical innovations to the physical, digital and virtual retail experience and the Appsfly team, with their core developer skills, will be an asset to the company's technology capabilities.

"This team has built deep expertise around offering contextual services via micro-apps which would be valuable in strengthening our ability to build and deliver a better experience to our customers," Vasudev said.

Appsfly was incubated at Axilor Ventures as part of their third batch. 

Based in Bengaluru, Walmart Labs India is the idea incubator for Walmart. The technology office is engaged in creating cutting-edge engineering and product development solutions to support Walmart in creating deeper, more intuitive ways of shopping. 

It was recently reported that Walmart Labs was looking to hire more than 1,000 employees at its India offices. Walmart currently has a workforce of 1,800 employees across its technology divisions in the country.

The US retail giant has been looking to ramp up its presence in India since announcing its $16-billion acquisition of Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, in May. The formalities of that deal were officially completed last month.