Acquisition will strengthen leadership team and deepen technology expertise
GO-JEK, Indonesia’s largest start-up has acquired Pianta, a 
Bangalore-based home healthcare services start-up for an undisclosed amount. This is the third Indian acquisition by the Indonesian unicorn following its previous buys in 2015 – Bangalore-based C42 Engineering and Delhi-based CodeIgnition. The acquisition will help fast track the development of GO-JEK’s logistics and transportation platforms to support its fast-growing Indonesia operations.
As part of the acquisition, the newly acquired firm will be wholly integrated into GO-JEK’s India arm, GO-JEK Engineering India. Based in Bangalore, GO-JEK Engineering India focuses on product innovation, mining data and crafting consumer experiences for its parent company GO-JEK. The company is looking to double its existing India headcount of 70 employees in the coming months.
“At GO-JEK, we constantly seek to continue to push the boundaries of innovation. Pianta’s role will be very important to strengthen our technology excellence to bring the best services for customers. We believe this acquisition will advance our mission to become the largest on-demand application of choice for all Indonesians,” said Nadiem Makarim, Founder and CEO of GO-JEK Indonesia.
Run by SLX Logistics Pvt. Ltd., Pianta is a marketplace for home healthcare services that helps discover and book appointments with healthcare providers who provide home visits for physiotherapy, nursing and lab sample collection. The start-up had raised an undisclosed seed funding in May 2016 from Freecharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon.
Founded in 2015 by former Ola and Flipkart executives Swaminathan Seetharaman, Ganesh Subramanian and Nitin Agarwal, Pianta has over 250 home service providers listed on its platform. Seetharaman has worked with Ola as vice president of engineering while Subramanian was earlier principal architect at Ola. Agarwal was earlier a director of engineering at Ola.
The acquisition will see the three co-founders strengthen the core leadership team at GO-JEK Engineering India, led by Sidu Ponnappa, whose tech firm C42 Engineering was bought in 2015 by GO-JEK, as its Managing Director.
Swaminathan Seetharaman, CEO & Co-founder, Pianta said “GO-JEK provides us with a great opportunity to leverage the capabilities that we at Pianta have built in the domain of on-demand delivery and logistics. It presents us with a large canvas to create a much larger impact and to create it faster”
Funded initially by the likes of Sequoia Capital and Yuri Milner’s DST Global, GO-JEK is currently the fastest growing start-up in South Asia and the largest in Indonesia in terms of valuation, funding raised and number of transactions. Having started as a bike-taxi business, the start-up has diversified into food delivery, one-hour courier delivery, grocery delivery and even has aggregated trucks on its platform. It has partnered with 200,000 motorcycle drivers and 5,000 trucks across Indonesia, all of whom, collectively cover an average distance of 4.5 million kilometres daily.
Last month, GO-JEK had secured more than $550 million in a new round of funding led by KKR and Warburg Pincus LLC, the largest ever for an Indonesian technology start-up. The start-up competes against the likes of Uber and Grab, two private car-hailing start-ups in Indonesia’s burgeoning ride-hailing industry.
With over 20 million app downloads, GO-JEK’s platform powers the Indonesian equivalents of Ola, Paytm, Swiggy, Grofers, Zomato, Dunzo and UrbanClap at a comparable scale. Its GO-FOOD business alone does more daily orders than all Indian food tech start-ups combined.
The company is actively looking for talent for key operations like data science, mobile, security and DevOps as it looks to shore up its technology operations in Bangalore and Singapore.
