Snapdeal's Promotor Jasper Infotech To Launch Incubator For Mobile Focused Startups

Jasper Infotech, the parent organization of Snapdeal is soon going to launch an incubator to foster mobile focused startups in the country. The incubator which is expected to be launched within the current fiscal year, will incubate about eight ventures for a period of two months per batch.

According to reports, incubator will run by separate team and startups will also receive seed funding from Snapdeal.

“We are in the process of structuring the incubator, and plans are, more or less, in place. We will start looking for companies once we have an interface for it, which will be separate from Snapdeal,” said Abhishek Kumar, head, corporate development, Snapdeal.

The news of setting up of incubator comes just a few months after, Kunal Bahl had shared about Snapdeal’s interests to have up to 4 mobile technology and data analytics related acquisitions.

The increasing mobile penetration in the country has made mobile an important focus for ecommerce companies to increase their reach. Both Snapdeal and Flipkart witness a large chunk of their traffic coming from Mobile.

Flipkart too is now working to invest in making it a mobile ecommerce company of the future. “Our intense focus on mobile and technology puts us in a unique position to take advantage of this massive opportunity. This new funding will enable us to step up our investments for innovations in products and technologies, setting us up to become the mobile e-commerce company of the future. This funding will help us further accelerate momentum and build our presence to become a technology powerhouse,” Sachin Bansal had said at the time of raising $ 1 Bn funding round.

Recent acquisition of ngpay by Flipkart appears to be the first towards this.

Let’s see how this incubator turns out for Snapdeal and will it be able to act as a feeder for Snapdeal for mobile related acquisition?

Snapdeal had raised about $435.7 Mn in funding and about $233 Mn this year alone from investors including Premji Invest, Temasek and eBay Inc. Recently, it had also raised a funding round led by Ratan Tata.