MUMBAI: Flipkart-owned digital payments platform PhonePe, yesterday, announced that it has acquired Zopper Retail, a hyperlocal point-of-sale platform for small and medium businesses. As part of the acquisition, Neeraj Jain, founder-CEO, Zopper will join the PhonePe team as head of product, offline merchant solutions.

The acquisition of Zopper is part of PhonePe’s aggressive strategy to build its offline payments business and thereby expand its customer base. With this acquisition, the Flipkart-owned digital payments company will hope to merge the value-added service capabilities of Zopper into its platform, thereby strengthening its offline proposition for merchants.

“Zopper has a very strong technology and innovation DNA, and Neeraj and team are also a great culture fit for PhonePe. Zopper Retail is specifically designed to meet the needs of millions of small retailers in India, and their strategy ties in very well with our overall vision of making digital payments universally accepted across the country,” said PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam as quoted by Inc 42.

Flipkart’s co-founders Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal had also made angel investments in Zopper in 2012. Founded in 2010, Zopper was initially a community-based product review site which then pivoted into a hyperlocal e-commerce site. In 2015-16, Zopper pivoted again and split its business into two distinct divisions – a Point of Sale (Pos) platform for offline merchants (Zopper Retail) and an extended warranty solutions unit for electronics purchased at offline outlets (Zopper Assure).

Last year, Flipkart made a commitment that it will invest $500 million in PhonePe to fight off competition. The acquisition will help the firm in the intensely competitive payments platform segment. Amongst its biggest competitors are India’s biggest payment company Paytm and Google’s Tez.