Singapore-based e-commerce enabler Shopmatic has announced its acquisition of a majority stake in Taiwan-based technology consulting firm, 5X Ruby on Thursday.
According to the details of the agreement, Shopmatic has acquired 51% stake in 5X Ruby in a mixed cash-and-stock deal for an undisclosed amount. The latter’s valuation was also not disclosed.
The move on Shopmatic’s part is aimed at strengthening its platform development team, in order to provide its customers a streamlined experience backed by the latest technology stack.
“We plan on developing value-added services for our customers including inventory management service, integrate payments on the platform, aggregation, and taxation. For these services, we will be using the technology from 5X Ruby. Some of the 20-member team of the company will be working with Shopmatic’s lab to design these solutions.” Anurag Avula, the co-founder of Shopmatic said.
Founded in December 2014 by Anurag Avula, Yen Ti Lim, and Kris Chen, Shopmatic is an international e-commerce platform, launched with the intent to help anyone wanting to sell online.
In other words, it aims to help merchants and individuals manage everything that is required for them to grow their business in the virtual world, that is from assisting managing merchants to develop their own unique web-store to aiding them with insights on how to sell online.
Besides building websites, Shopmatic also helps integrate payment gateways, establish partnerships with logistics companies, and facilitate listings in marketplaces and social media. The service also includes a backend analytics platform.
On the other end, 5X Ruby has been the at the forefront of technical consultation and training. The firm has built a vibrant and growing Ruby developer community in Taiwan catering to high-tech clients from Japan, Hong Kong & Taiwan developing web and mobile applications.
The technology company in-house software Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application development format written in Ruby 5X held under the MIT License. The system acts as a model-view-controller framework which uses less code and provides default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages.
The Taiwanese firm, in turn, lies in sync with Shopmatic’s aspirations to deploy the latest technologies and simplify the process for those who intends to take their business online, without the requirement for technical knowledge.
Besides, the acquisition will also facilitate the company’s international market expansion plans, which aims to target markets outside Singapore by early 2017, particularly to strengthen its presence in other South Asian markets such as Japan.
“This acquisition will not only enable us to strengthen our stance as the leading platform that enables businesses to go online but also to scale and enter new markets at a faster pace. We welcome the 5xRuby team into the Shopmatic family and are excited about the opportunity of working with a world-class development team,” said Anurag Avula.
In 2015, Singapore-headquartered Shopmatic has launched its operations in Gurgaon and Bangalore in India. The company has also launched a mobile app, earlier last month for Indian Sellers called Go, which is an easy tool to create an e-commerce website in less than two minutes with three easy steps. Reportedly 85-90% of Shopmatic’s business comes from India.
By Vivian Foo, Unicron Media
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