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Business News/ Companies / Start-ups/  Quikr acquires Stayglad for undisclosed amount
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Quikr acquires Stayglad for undisclosed amount

Stayglad's deal with Quikr, mostly in stock, has valued the company at less than `50 crore

The beauty service provider was in talks with Accel Partners and Matrix Partners for raising a fresh round of funds, but the talks fell through, prompting it to scout for a buyer.Premium
The beauty service provider was in talks with Accel Partners and Matrix Partners for raising a fresh round of funds, but the talks fell through, prompting it to scout for a buyer.

Bengaluru: Listings website Quikr India Pvt. Ltd has acquired on-demand home beauty services provider StayGlad for an undisclosed sum after the start-up failed to attract new investors and ran out of cash, two people aware of the development said.

StayGlad, owned by Glow Prime Technologies Pvt. Ltd, was in talks with Accel Partners and Matrix partners to raise funds but the talks were unsuccessful, prompting the company to scout for a buyer, the two people cited above said, on the condition of anonymity.

Quikr did not disclose terms of the deal. According to one of the two people cited above, the deal, mostly in stocks, valued StayGlad at less than Rs50 crore. StayGlad had also explored possibilities of an acquisition by on-demand home service provider UrbanClap, but the talks failed, said the second person cited above.

Quikr confirmed the development.

This is Quikr’s third acquisition in the on-demand home beauty services space. In May, Quikr acquired Gurgaon-based home beauty services provider Salosa for an undisclosed amount to bolster its presence in the segment. In July, Quikr rebranded Salosa as AtHomeDiva and launched a separate home beauty service under the QuikrServices vertical. In August, the company acquired another home beauty service provider Zapluk.

Quikr had earlier committed an investment of Rs250 crore to strengthen its home services vertical.

“On-demand beauty is one of our fastest growing service categories. With well more than half of our consumers coming back to us with bigger ticket sizes, the demand is clearly very strong. As a service provider we want to continue to scale to meet that demand. StayGlad is one of the largest and highest quality players in beauty services with a 70% customer repeat rate, which makes them a great fit for our overall vision for AtHomeDiva," P.D. Sundar, head of QuikrServices, said in a statement.

StayGlad was founded by Shashank Gupta, Kavish Desai and Prateek Jain in May 2015. In June last year, the company raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Sahil Barua, co-founder of e-commerce focused logistics company Delhivery and TracxnLabs, the venture capital arm of Tracxn, a start-up tracker. The company went on to raise an undisclosed amount in a Series A funding round from Bessemer Venture Partners and Anil Chopra, former chief executive officer at Lakme Lever Pvt. Ltd.

The 100-member team at StayGlad, including the co-founders, will join Quikr.

In the home beauty segment, Quikr’s AtHomeDiva, currently operates in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Gurgaon and Hyderabad, competes with BigStylist, Belita, VanityCube, MyGlam and The Home Salon among others.

In the recent past, the segment has seen ample interest from offline businesses as well. For instance, in April this year, salon chain Naturals picked up a majority stake in online home beauty service start-up Vyomo for Rs100 crore and rebranded it Naturals@Home. The same month, MyGlam raised $6 million in a funding round led by France-based natural beauty products chain L’Occitane.

The acquisition is part of Quikr’s verticalization drive, where it is focusing on five key business segments—automobiles, real estate, jobs, services and customer-to-customer sales—it has identified as new sources of revenue and fend off competition from other venture capital-backed businesses that have emerged in each of these categories.

Quikr is growing beyond a listing platform to a one-stop shop for used goods by enabling payments on its platform, as well as facilitating logistics, a move likely to throw open additional revenue channels at a time when a slowdown in external funding is prompting start-ups to reduce cash burn and focus on profitability.

The company has so far raised $346 million from investors such as Tiger Global Management, Warburg Pincus and Norwest Venture Partners, among others.

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Published: 13 Sep 2016, 02:01 PM IST
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