Satya Ganni, Co-founder of Martmobi, an m-commerce startup recently acquired by Snapdeal, says mobile evolution has to happen naturally
Team Martmobi
For Martmobi, the call from Snapdeal came when it was in the midst of raising a large Series A funding. But the Hyderabad-based m-commerce startup decided to grab the offer from Snapdeal, as it felt that being part of an e-commerce behemoth was more worthy than raising funding. Interestingly, all it took was two-three months for Martmobi to close the deal.
Founded in December 2012 by Satya Krishna Ganni and Pramod Nair, Martmobi is a BitChemy Ventures-backed startup that offers an m-commerce platform for e-commerce sites, brands and retailers to have an instant mobile presence without writing a single line of code.
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In an interaction with e27, Ganni talks about the acquisition, evolution of mobile, and more…
Excerpts:
Is it a proper acquisition or an acqui-hire? What will happen to the co-founders and the employees of Martmobi?
It is a proper acquisition, and we we will continue to retain our brand and the technology even after the acquisition. In the next month or so, you will see more updates. We have some big plans, which will be completely independent of Snapdeal.
How did this offer come by? When did you get the first call from Snapdeal?
Our vision with Martmobi has always been to build an m-commerce platform. We built a platform for merchants across the globe, and built a very strong and design IP around that. Snapdeal got really interested in our product because in the past year or so, our traffic was going up five per cent month-on-month to a total of almost 75 per cent for the full year.
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Snapdeal needs to continuously invest in mobile to become a market leader. That’s why it looked at our technology. It approached us in March this year. Things went pretty fast, and we closed the deal in May.
How does Snapdeal benefit from this deal? What will happen to your current clients?
We will power Snapdeal’s mobile platform and we bring to the table the learning from serving hundreds of merchants across the globe.
Most of our current clients will transition to the Snapdeal platform, but we will continue to support them.
Is Snapdeal moving to a mobile-only platform as Myntra recently did?
I don’t think so, because it is getting page traffic even from the remotest parts of the country. All these people still access it via browser and these users don’t have the memory on their phone to download a 5MB/10MB app.
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I don’t think there is [any] point in forcing people to download and install the app. In my view, the evolution has to happen naturally. Going mobile-only makes sense only when 90 per cent of your page traffic is from mobile and when people demand better experience via app.
Last year, Paytm launched a mobile-only commerce platform, and many other companies are adopting a similar strategy. In this context, how do you read the current trends in the market?
The fundamental trend is that mobile Internet is still in its nascent stage. However, it is growing fast, because close to 200 million to 300 million Internet users in India are browsing on the mobile. People in Tier III cities use mobile to access various sites and they don’t use desktops, because the smartphone has become cheaper. And it will definitely explode and we have started seeing mobile-only solutions emerge from India.
You were in the midst of raising a large VC funding round? Then why did you choose to go with the Snapdeal offer?
We were on the verge of closing a very large round, but we saw a better opportunity here at Snapdeal. The benefit is multi-dimensional, and we really liked the aggressiveness of the Snapdeal founders.
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