O2O Deals Marketplace Little Acquires Gurugram Based Stylofie

Bengaluru-based O2O deals marketplace Little has acquired Stylofie, a curated online marketplace for salons and spas.

The acquisition will enable Little to further penetrate the beauty and wellness segment. According to a company statement, it will get access to more than 50,000 registered visitors and 1,000+ merchants on the Stylofie platform.

Commenting on the acquisition with Inc42, Prateek Agarwal co-founder of Stylofie said, “We believe that the trend is towards consolidation of apps inside a customer’s mobile. Thus customers are happier if one app can do multiple stuff for them. Thus we partnered with Little to merge our business model with theirs & provide salon bookings to the existing customers of Little. We were planning to expand horizontally ourselves for past few months (we launched our spa brand – Stylomee also), and then this opportunity came along and we decided to move ahead with the same.”

Gurugram-based beauty and wellness services marketplace Stylofie was founded in 2015 by MDI Gurgaon graduates Prateek Agarwal, Saurav Dey, and Balaji Srinivasan. It provides consumers with the opportunity to book, compare, and rate salon/spas in Bengaluru, Delhi, and Gurugram. At the same time, they also provide merchants with insights and data into their daily operations.

With this move, Stylofie’s founder Saurav will be joining the Little team whilst the other two founders Prateek and Balaji will be exiting. Balaji has joined FarEye and Prateek has decided to join Telecom Oman as their CEO of wholesale business. The rest of the Stylofie team will join Little and will be based out of its office in Gurugram.

On the other hand, Little was founded by Manish Chopra and Satish Mani, the entrepreneurs behind the online fashion brand Zovi. It is an app-only marketplace for deals in the O2O space. According to a company statement, Little has over 25,000 merchants present in 15 cities offering 50,000+ live deals across F&B, movies, last-minute hotels, health and wellness, as well as unique experiences.

Last year in January 2016, it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. The round was an extension of the July 2015 round, in which the company had raised $50 Mn from Paytm, along with participation from Tiger Global Management and SAIF Partners. Other startups in this segment include Crownit, NearU, Nearbuy, etc.