Amazon Acquires Indian Digital Retail Platform Perpule

Amazon has bought retail tech startup Perpule in an all-cash deal worth nearly 1.1 billion Indian rupees (about $14.7 million), Mint reported.

The U.S. tech giant is likely to pay remuneration to the employees of Perpule. That could help continue to bolster the deal up to around 1.5 billion Indian rupees (about $20.4 million), according to the report.

The acquisition will help boost Amazon’s viability in the kirana-tech space, the report stated. A kirana is a small shop.

Amazon wants to use Perpule’s cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) offering, UltraPOS, in order to offer a new suite of tech products for kirana partners, the report stated. It will also look at updating the digital technology for partners. UltraPOS is a service aimed at helping small businesses via a store management solution.

For Perpule, investors will likely see four or five times what they put in as returns, according to the report. Most of Perpule’s staff, among them Co-Founders Abhinav Pathak, Saketh BSV and Yogesh Ghaturle, will likely join Amazon.

An Amazon India spokesperson confirmed the acquisition, according to Mint, saying that it would help offline stores of varying sizes “better manage their inventory, checkout processes, and overall customer experience.”

Last year, Amazon launched its Smart Stores program, which helps offline stores digitize their inventories. It has also scaled its Local Shops program to include over 50,000 offline retailers by March, planning to double that by the end of the year, the report stated.

Amazon has asked India to hold off on new eCommerce regulations. The Indian government has been looking into Amazon’s business practices and focusing on the treatment of sellers and foreign investment on the company’s sites as it expedites a battle over digital retail.

Indian retailers argue that Amazon, along with Walmart’s Flipkart, have been damaging to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), breaking India’s rules over foreign investments.