Quikr buys beauty service provider Salosa
Move will help Quikr to penetrate deeper into the home services segment
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Bengaluru: Online classifieds portal Quikr India Pvt. Ltd has acquired on-demand beauty service provider Salosa, owned by Beawel Tech Pvt. Ltd, for an undisclosed amount in a move that will help the Tiger Global Management-backed company penetrate deeper into the home services segment.
Salosa, founded by former Procter & Gamble executives Piyush Dhanuka and Anurag Nair in September 2015, currently operates in Gurgaon and parts of Delhi with a team of in-house beauticians.
“The beauty services market is close to $5 billion in India and growing, which is evident from the increasing number of requests we see from Tier I and Tier II cities on our platform. On-demand beauty service is an important sub-category and Salosa will help bring very real benefits to our consumers," said P.D. Sundar, head of QuikrServices.
Quikr had earlier committed an investment of ₹ 250 crore to strengthen its home services vertical. QuikrServices has 250,000 service providers who offer more than 80 services for consumers and has about 100,000 daily customers, the company claims.
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.
Quikr 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.
As a classifieds portal, Quikr has just one rival: OLX, which is backed by Naspers Ltd, a South African mass media company. However, each of the verticals the company plans to focus on has seen the emergence of a number of well-funded start-ups.
In the automobile segment, Quikr competes with the likes of CarDekho and CarTrade, while the real estate segment has businesses such as Housing, Magicbricks and PropTiger, among others. Similarly, the hyperlocal services segment has deep-pocketed start-ups such as Housejoy and UrbanClap, while in the jobs category, the likes of Babajob and AasaanJobs compete with Quikr.
The company has so far raised $346 million from investors such as Tiger Global Management, Warburg Pincus and Norwest Venture Partners, among others.
Quikr has been investing aggressively to build these verticals by both acquiring companies and making strategic investments, especially in the real estate segment. For instance, it acquired real estate portal Commonfloor (maxHeap Technologies Pvt. Ltd) for $120 million in January.
This apart, it has acquired Indian Realty Exchange (123 Startup Ventures Pvt. Ltd), a real estate agent aggregator, and RealtyCompass, a real estate analytics start-up, besides making a strategic investment in A.N. Virtual World Tech Ltd, a company which provides 360-degree street views.
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