Japan’s Beenos and Infosys co-founder invest in Buyhatke, India’s price comparison startup

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based internet service company Beenos (TSE:3328) announced today that it has invested in Bangalore-based startup Byhatke, the startup behind Indian price comparison site Buyhatke.com. This was co-invested with Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of India’s leading system integration company Infosys, and is valued at $1 million.

Buyhatke was founded in 2013 by Gaurav Dahake and his team while attending Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Buyhatke.com curates profiles of over 3,000 items from more than 300 e-commerce sites, providing users with real-time price information based on data analysis. The platform proposes the best timing to buy a product based on past price trends, alerts when the price hits the bottom, and also offers search engine for discount coupons that can be used at purchase. When Xiaomi and OnePlusPne released their smartphones in India last year, the platform offers consumers accurate analysis of price trends for the products on many e-commerce sites in Asia, which attracted many users and catapulted the service into fame.

The company consists of a 15-person team, and many members are from IITs and previously worked at companies like Amazon, Samsung, and India’s leading e-commerce site Flipcart. The company will use the funds to expand the team to 50 by end of the year.

Starting with investment in online marketplace ShopClues in January 2013, Beenos has accelerated its investment efforts in the Indian e-commerce market including the one in payments solution company CitrusPay. While Beenos founder Teruhide Sato stepped down as CEO of Beenos last December, he previously shared his insight that online marketplaces are king, payments solutions companies are queen, as well as affiliate and price comparison sites are princes in the e-commerce industry. He is no longer involved in managing Beenos, but the company’s series of investments in Indian startups definitely follows his perspective. Sato also became an angel investor in an Indian startup.

A recent fund formed by Japan’s Rebright Partners indicates a boom in investments in startups focused on consumer Internet services in India.

Edited by Kurt Hanson