The US-based online restaurant reservations firm OpenTable Inc has acquired Mumbai and Silicon Valley-based mobile payments startup JustChalo, run by JustChalo Technologies and JustChalo Inc, for around $11 million.
“Mobile is increasingly important to our business and the JustChalo team’s expertise will help accelerate our development efforts in this area. We are looking forward to integrating JustChalo’s engineers into our team and continuing to enhance the mobile experience for diners and our restaurant customers,†said Joseph Essas, CTO of OpenTable in a statement.
In the first quarter of 2013, reservations booked on mobile devices accounted for 36 per cent of the 34 million diners OpenTable seated in North America, as per its statement.
Techcircle.in tried reaching JustChalo for more details, but did not get any response at the time of posting this article.
JustChalo was co-founded by Kashyap Deorah and Rishi Deshpande. Prior to JustChalo, Deorah was president at FutureBazaar.com, an e-commerce portal of the Future Group. Earlier, he was CEO of Mumbai-based Phone Commerce, which was acquired by FutureBazaar and got merged with it.
Recently, JustChalo secured undisclosed funding from Ash Bharadwaj and Rakesh Mathur.
Bharadwaj is the former founding CEO of the communications software firm Aricent while Mathur is a serial entrepreneur who sold Junglee to Amazon in 1998 for $240 million. An IIT Bombay alumnus, Mathur also served as the founding CEO of Webaroo (SMS GupShup), founding CEO of Stratify (acquired by Iron Mountain in 2007 for $160 million) and founder and CEO of SnapStick Inc (recently acquired by Rovi) and Chrononix Inc besides being the founder director of InfoNam Inc. He is also an advisor to the private equity firm Riverwood Capital.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)