Uber's biggest rival out of India Lyft, a US-based cab-haling firm, has acquired Pune-based startup FinitePaths for an undisclosed sum to tap India's large talent base to solve its global technology problems, reported Business Standard.
Founded in 2015 by Vinay Kakade (Ex-Amazon) and Balaji Raghavan (Ex-Google), FinePaths has a sole product offering --Trail Answers, an app on iOS and Android platforms, which helped get answers to its users’ local questions using social, local and contextual signals.
The details of the deal were not disclosed. Post acquisition both the co-founders of FinitePaths will join the Lyft team however it is unclear whether the rest of the small team at the startup would be transitioning to work with Lyft or not.
The startup has now stopped signing up new users for for its Trial Answers app and will be shutting down the app for existing users over next 2 weeks.
"We are very excited to have Balaji and Vinay join our team. They have extensive experience building large scale infrastructure and services. We see this experience as playing a critical role in helping us tackle some of the unique challenges we have at Lyft," said Luc Vincent, VP of Engineering at Lyft, in a statement.
Notably, more and more ride-hailing companies are eyeing India as an important of their strategy, for instance Indonesian bike taxi service Go-Jek has acquired four Indian startups - Pianta, C42 Technologies, CodeIgnition and LeftShip to shore up talent for its development centre in India, and Uber's another rival, in Southeast Asia, Grab had recently announced its plans to setup a research centre in Bengaluru where it would employ 200 engineers that would largely work on payment technologies.
Uber too had opened its technology development centre in Bengaluru in February 2016, with the mandate to build solutions for the local market which could then be exported to other markets.
Founded in 2015 by Vinay Kakade (Ex-Amazon) and Balaji Raghavan (Ex-Google), FinePaths has a sole product offering --Trail Answers, an app on iOS and Android platforms, which helped get answers to its users’ local questions using social, local and contextual signals.
The details of the deal were not disclosed. Post acquisition both the co-founders of FinitePaths will join the Lyft team however it is unclear whether the rest of the small team at the startup would be transitioning to work with Lyft or not.
The startup has now stopped signing up new users for for its Trial Answers app and will be shutting down the app for existing users over next 2 weeks.
"We are very excited to have Balaji and Vinay join our team. They have extensive experience building large scale infrastructure and services. We see this experience as playing a critical role in helping us tackle some of the unique challenges we have at Lyft," said Luc Vincent, VP of Engineering at Lyft, in a statement.
Notably, more and more ride-hailing companies are eyeing India as an important of their strategy, for instance Indonesian bike taxi service Go-Jek has acquired four Indian startups - Pianta, C42 Technologies, CodeIgnition and LeftShip to shore up talent for its development centre in India, and Uber's another rival, in Southeast Asia, Grab had recently announced its plans to setup a research centre in Bengaluru where it would employ 200 engineers that would largely work on payment technologies.
Uber too had opened its technology development centre in Bengaluru in February 2016, with the mandate to build solutions for the local market which could then be exported to other markets.
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