Indian Healthcare Startup Pianta Gets Acquired By Indonesian Unicorn Startup GO-JEK

Bangalore-based home healthcare services startup Pianta has been acquired by GO-JEK, an Indonesian unicorn startup, for an undisclosed amount. GO-JEK is backed by Sequoia Capital and Yuri Milner-backed DST Global and deals in hyperlocal transport, logistics and payments services in Indonesia.

The acquisition is expected to bolster the Indonesian startup's entry into the India's healthcare space. "GO-JEK is moving to launch an on-demand healthcare product which might have on demand delivery and logistics issues, which is where Pianta forte is," said Sidu Ponnappa, Managing Director, GO-JEK Engineering India.

The acquisition happened within 4 months of funding that Pianta received from Freecharge Founders – Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon.

Pianta was founded in 2015 by former Ola and Flipkart executives Swaminathan Seetharaman, Ganesh Subramanian and Nitin Agarwal. 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.

In August of this year, GO-JEK became the first startup of Indonesian origin to be classified as a Unicorn after raising $550 million from the likes of KKR, Warburg Pincus, Farallon Capital, Capital Group Private Markets.

Prior to this acquisition, Go-Jek has acquired two more Indian startups -- C42 Engineering and CodeIgnition, in February.

In India, GO-JEK doesn't have any services but has an engineering centre in Bengaluru where it employs 60 people.

Pianta Raises Seed Round from Freecharge Founders - Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon

Bangalore based technology startup, Pianta has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a seed round from Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, who are the co-founders of Freecharge.

Run by SLX Logistics Pvt. Ltd, Pianta is a marketplace for Home healthcare that allows users to discover and book appointments with healthcare providers for a range of at-home services like Physiotherapy, Nursing and Lab sample collection. Currently the startup has coverage for home services across the length and breadth of Bangalore and is looking to expand to major metros in the coming year.

Pianta's USP is a sophisticated geo-spatial allocation and routing platform which will eliminate manual efforts in allocation/scheduling and minimize travel time and maximize the utilization of the field force. The firm also sells it's proprietary practice management software Pianta+ to enable efficiency and streamline operations. Pianta+ enables home service providers to effectively manage their field force, track them realtime and digitise customer artifacts.

With a vision is to build the world's best geo-spatial allocation and routing platform, Pianta aims to enable utmost efficiency in utilization of field force through cutting edge technology and machine learning. With this, the company aims to serve businesses across diverse segments including home services, logistics and sales force management in the time to come.

The startup was started by Swaminathan Seetharaman, who earlier worked as the Vice-President for Engineering at Ola along with with his former colleagues Ganesh Subramanian and Nitin Agarwal who held various leadership positions at Ola and Flipkart.

Image Source: ShutterStock