Walmart Labs Adds Two More Indian Startups To Its Kitty

Technology arm of the global retail giant, Walmart Labs has acquihired two Bengaluru-based startups — FloCare and BigTrade. Post acquisition, both these startups will join the Walmart’s team. 

While, the healthtech startup FloCare will be integrated into customer technology part of Walmart’s online pharmacy, BigTrade, which is a B2B wholesale trading platform, will contribute to the supply chain part of Walmart’s business. 

Commenting on the acquisition, Hari Vasudev, center head and technology vice president  of Walmart Labs India said, “Walmart’s Online Pharmacy and Supply Chain business are renowned across the globe and I am sure the FloCare and BigTrade teams will strengthen our capabilities as we strive to build awesome omnichannel customer experiences around the globe.”

FloCare was cofounded by Gagan Goel and Gaurav Gupta in 2018. FloCare is a stealth-mode startup, aimed at building products and technologies to make home healthcare an affordable and scalable service. 

Whereas, the NASSCOM-incubated wholesale trading platform, BigTrade was founded in 2017. The platform connects connects manufacturers, importers and wholesalers with the retailer for the bulk trading. It enables traders or resellers from the small towns and remote places of the country procure their day to day inventory directly from the metro city manufacturers and importers.  

The company assists traders in the entire trading cycle right from the discovery of the product to its delivery, which includes logistics and payment/credit services as well.

Walmart claims to  serve over 275 Mn customers a week across its 11.3K stores globally. The company claims to have recorded a revenue of $514.4 Bn in FY18. Walmart services are said to be accessible through 58 banners in 27 countries and 10 ecommerce websites. 

Walmart Labs In India

The India office of Walmart Labs was setup in Bengaluru in 2011 and is said to be responsible for 90% of Walmart’s India operations. It is aimed at supporting Walmart in providing a seamless customer experience – whether that’s online or in stores.  Walmart Labs team include a diverse group of data scientists, product managers, architects, developers, and technologists.

After acquiring Indian ecommerce major Flipkart for $16 Bn, Walmart has been aggressively expanding its engineering team with tech acquisitions. Earlier this year, the company had shared plans of hiring 1K people in India, mainly in the areas of machine learning, merchandise, supply chain, data science, product managers and cloud experts.

Recently in February 2019, Walmart Labs had also acquihired a Bengaluru-based deeptech startup Dataturks, to use the latter’s machine learning (ML) capabilities in various projects for the digital arm of the Walmart’s retail stores. 

Also in 2018, Walmart Labs had acquihired two more Indian startups including machine learning startup Int.Ai which contributed to its Indian engineering team and SaaS startup Appsfly which was integrated in the Walmart’s customer experience engineering team.