Paytm’ s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Saif Partners’ Alok Goel join local deal discovery app Little board

Paytm co-founder Vijay Shekar Sharma and Saif Partners’ Alok Goel have joined on the board hyper local deal discovery app little as directors.Growth comes few months aft3er Paytm,SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management invested $50 million in the mobile -only app.
“Vijay and Alok will be joining our board, they will help immensely in taking the next leap,” Manish Chopra, CEO of Little.
The company which started operations three months ago offers 30,000 deals from over 10,000 merchants. More than 500,000 users on the app get access to last minute inventory deals on restaurants, movies, hotels and salons among others, on a real-time hyper local basis at heavy discounts across 11 cities.
This model Chopra believes would continue to draw customers to its platform and help it achieve $ 170 million gross merchandise value (GM V)
by March next year. The company plans to expand to 1000 people from 400 at present, and add more cities over the next four months.
Approximately 15000 daily transaction expected from deal of 50000 being offered.
Paytm’ s capability and consumer base becomes an advantage for Little, Sharma said. “Paytm will help Little acquire customers faster, sort out payment and the preference level, and we’re able to bring these differentiators,” he added.
This app works with Paytm the country’s largest mobile wallet and offers its deal on the app after the recharge is done. With Paytm’ s own focus on creating online-to-offline models, partnering with Little fitted perfectly in the payments provider’s game plan.
“We will help the team in the strategic thinking process. Online to offline is a huge area but extremely difficult to crack. The ones who do will become the most valuable companies,” said Goel, who was former head of Free charge.
Little Internet Pvt Ltd is run by Manish Chopra and Satish Mani, both of whom co-founded online fashion brand Zovi. Both Chopra and Mani continue to run Zovi, which is also backed by SAIF and Tiger Global. Chopra added that the company will expand the board in ..