Paytm acquires Shifu for $8mn to enrich customer experience

New Delhi, Jan 4: Paytm has acquired Shifu for USD 8 million (about Rs 53.2 crore), a move that will enable the digital payments company to offer more personalised user experience.

Shifu, a context-aware personal assistant application, mines the smartphone usage patterns of users and makes personalised and highly relevant recommendations to them.

"Through the acquisition, Paytm aims to leverage the tech infrastructure of Shifu to enrich the customer experience it offers to its users. The 20-member team behind Shifu has also come on board across various verticals at Paytm," Paytm said in a statement today.

By integrating Shifu's technology and behavioural modelling with Paytm app, Paytm Senior Vice President Kiran Vasireddy said, "we will be able to offer a highly intuitive and personalised experience to our users".

"This acquisition will give further impetus to our focus on Artificial intelligence which will bring the next wave of disruption in ecommerce," Vasireddy said. By predicting user behaviour based on past usage, location and other data points, Paytm's platform will be able to offer relevant recommendations to our users, he added.

Shifu, created by Delhi-based The Signals, is a free task-managing app. Once the app is installed, it analyses the usage patterns of the device owner and give various suggestions based on a predictive algorithm.

While the app will continue to be available in its original form after the acquisition, the technology behind it will be used by Paytm. Paytm has a user base of more than 100 million people.

In November, Paytm acquired home service marketplace Near.in for an undisclosed amount to boost online-to-offline (O2O) play.

PTI