With Sequoia As Pillion, Go-Jek’s Indian Motorcycle Diaries Kick Off: Acquires C42 and CodeIgnition

Indonesian bike-taxi service Go-Jek has acquired two Indian startups, Bangalore-based software company C42 Engineering and Noida-based CodeIgnition, for an undisclosed amount.

With this the founding members of both the startups will be a part of Go-Jek’s tech-leadership.

The deal is aimed at helping Go-Jek set up an R&D centre in Bangalore, where it plans to recruit over 100 senior engineers in the next six months.

Go-Jek was founded in 2011 and began as a bike-taxi service and, later on, diversified into food, courier and grocery delivery. The startup has also aggregated trucks on its platform. It has partnered with over 200,000 motorcycle drivers and 5,000 trucks across Indonesia.

The Sequoia-backed, Go-Jek, recently got hit by a bug on its mobile-app. That’s when it came in contact with the Indian startups in search for a solution to the software bug. Nadiem Makarim, Go-Jek founder, recalls that when they lost control over growth, Sequoia extended a helping hand by introducing them to the founders of C42 and CodeIgnition. The two startups helped Go-Jek scale-up backend operations to match demand and growing user base.

Makarim is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and has worked at McKinsey and Rocket Internet. Talking about Go-Jek, he said, “We are all online and offline businesses rolled up into one, which is unlike India and China where things are fairly specialised. Go-Jek is a mix of Ola, Zomato, Tinyowl, Grofers and few other startups rolled into one given the cross selling opportunities.”

On the other hand, Bangalore-based C42 Engineering was founded by  Niranjan Paranjape, Aakash Dharmadhikar and Sidu Ponnappa in 2010. It is a technology consultancy that specialises in delivering extremely high quality Ruby and Rails solutions. The company has been tech consultants for companies like Flipkart, Staples Labs, Quintype, UrbanLadder, etc.

While Noida-based CodeIgnition helps new and emerging startups to build, deploy, automate & scale-up infrastructure and app solutions. It was founded by Ajey Gore, along with Sumit Gupta, Shraddha Gore, Shobhit Srivastava, and Mehakdeep Singh, in 2013.

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