Flipkart buys Israeli predictive analytics startup Upstream Commerce

Walmart-owned Flipkart, the country’s largest e-commerce company, said on Tuesday that it has acquired Upstream Commerce, an Israeli startup which uses predictive analytics to automatically fix retail prices of products.

The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Upstream Commerce builds cloud-based, automated real-time pricing and product analysis solutions. According to a statement, these offerings will strengthen Flipkart’s ability to deliver insights to its sellers, helping them optimise their product assortment and pricing strategies.

The Upstream Commerce team will continue to work out of Israel after the buyout. 

Flipkart said the acquisition was in line with its “vision to solve e-commerce challenges through technology innovations - both through in-house efforts as well as the inorganic route.” 

“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,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, chief executive officer of Flipkart.

Founded in 2010 by Amos Peleg and Shai Geva, Upstream Commerce is backed by Israeli investment firm YL Ventures. 

Peleg used to work for multinational corporation SAP while Geva is a former executive of software giant Adobe Systems.

Investment banking firm Avendus Capital served as the financial adviser to Upstream Commerce for the deal.

The acquisition of Upstream comes a month after Flipkart had announced that it was buying Liv.ai, an artificial intelligence-based speech recognition startup, as part of efforts to enable voice shopping on its platform and fend off main rival Amazon.

Days before that, US retail giant Walmart had completed its $16-billion acquisition of Flipkart.

Flipkart has acquired a number of firms over the years to build various verticals and capabilities.

In September last year, it had acquired electronic products repair and services startup F1 Info Solutions to enhance its after-sales service offerings.

Three months before that, Flipkart had acquired Silicon Valley startup F7 Labs, which is working on an artificial intelligence project named Mira.