Indonesia's Go-Jek acquires Leftshift to take on Ola, Uber

Indonesian ride-sharing firm GO-JEK acquired its fourth firm in India to beef its technology team in the country to over 100 that will help on rivals such as Uber and Grab back home.

On Tuesday, it acquired for an undisclosed sum Leftshift, a Pune-based mobile application development firm, which built its app to allows users book in the southeast Asian country. The app development firm gives it access to more resources to fine tune its app and offer better user experience to retain customers against rivals.

The nearly decade old Leftshift has been a vendor for Craftsvilla, Practo, Byju's, NH7, CitrusPay and PepperTap, besides GO JEK, with cumulative app downloads of over 42 million.

Started in 2007 by Sudhanshu Raheja and Abhinit Tiwari, Liftshift claims to have a cumulative app downloads more than 42 million on the App Store.

"The opportunities and challenges at GO-JEK are beyond thrilling. Being fully aware of its operations, we immediately knew that our resources and technology would certainly complement and accelerate product development at GO-JEK," said Raheja.

GO-JEK was founded by Harvard graduate Nadiem Makarim in 2011 as a bike-taxi business and has now diversified into delivery and logistics business. It has partnered with 200,000 motorcycle drivers and 5,000 trucks across Indonesia and claims to be the largest start-up in the country in terms of valuation, funding raised and number of transactions.

In August, GO-JEK had raised more than $550 million in a new round of funding led by KKR and Warburg Pincus LLC, the largest ever for an Indonesian technology start-up. Following the deal, the start-up was valued at over $1.3 billion and competes against the likes of Uber and Grab, two private car-hailing start-ups in Indonesia's flourishing ride-hailing industry.

The company also stated that it intends to continue shoring up its India operations as it eyes more talent for key processes like data science, mobile, security and development operations.