Quikr acquires Stayglad, its 8th buy in a year

Tiger Global-funded online classifieds platform, Quikr on Tuesday, bought for an undisclosed sum Stayglad, a marketplace for beauty services, making its eighth acquisition of struggling rivals in a weak-funding market.
 

Quikr Founder & Chief Executive Officer Pranay Chulet (pictured) has adopted a strategy of deepening its vertical offering in select sectors such as cars, beauty services, homes and jobs. Since November 2015, he has bought smaller rivals at bargain prices in each of these segments that have struggled to raise additional funds to sustain themselves, helping Quikr gain access to technology and marketing talent, besides clients. 
 

Bessemer Venture Partners and Anil Chopra, a former chief executive at Lakmé Lever, had invested an undisclosed sum in Series A funding in Bengaluru-based Stayglad last year. The outfit, with around 100 employees, would be merged with AtHomeDiva - a home beauty service of QuikrServices. 
 

“On-demand beauty is one of our fastest-growing service categories. With well more than half of our consumers coming back to us with bigger ticket sizes, the demand is clearly very strong,” said P D Sundar, head, QuikrServices. “StayGlad is one of the largest and highest quality players in beauty services, with a 70 per cent customer repeat rate, which makes them a great fit for our overall vision for AtHomeDiva. We are excited to bring them on board.”
 

Stayglad is the third firm that Quikr has bought in the beauty segment, after Salosa and Zapluk early this year. In addition, Quikr has acquired three firms in real estate - Realty Exchange, a mobile-first aggregator of real estate agents; real estate analytics platform RealtyCompass and CommonFloor, a local listing rival funded by Tiger Global. It also has one acquisition each in auto and jobs segment - Stepni and Hiree, a white-collar focused recruitment firm.
 

Chulet, who founded Quikr, modelled on Craigslist, is part of India’s list of around a dozen unicorns with a valuation of over $1.5 billion, has been looking for acquisitions to strengthen its verticalisation strategy. Quikr has raised $346 million in six rounds from investors such as Tiger Global, Warburg Pincus and Norwest Venture Partners.