Indonesia's Go-Jek acquires Pianta, a Bangalore-based healthcare startup

Go-Jek, one of Indonesia’s largest startups, has acquired Pianta, a Bangalore-based healthcare service. After Bangalore-based C42 Engineering and Delhi-based CodeIgnition, Pianta becomes the third Indian company to be snapped by Go-Jek. The financial terms remain undisclosed. Pianta will be completely integrated into Go-Jek’s India arm called Go-Jek Engineering India, and the acquisition is aimed at fast-tracking the development of Go-Jek’s logistics and transportation platforms that will support its Indonesia operations. Based in Bangalore, G0-Jek Engineering looks at product innovation, mining data and crafting consumer experiences for Go-Jek. The company also plans to double its existing India headcount of 70 employees in the coming months. “At Go-Jek, we constantly seek to continue to push the boundaries of innovation. Pianta’s role will be very important to strengthen our technology excellence to bring the best services for customers. We believe this acquisition will advance our mission to become the largest on-demand application of choice for all Indonesians,” said Nadiem Makarim, Founder and CEO of Go-Jek Indonesia. On the other hand, Pianta is a marketplace for home healthcare services. It helps discover and book appointments with healthcare providers for home visits related to physiotherapy, nursing and lab sample collection. The startup had raised an undisclosed seed funding in May 2016 from Freecharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon. Pianta was founded in 2015 by former Ola and Flipkart executives, Swaminathan Seetharaman, Ganesh Subramanian and Nitin Agarwal, and has more than 250 home service providers listed on its platform. Swaminathan Seetharaman, CEO & Co-founder, Pianta said “Go-Jek provides us with a great opportunity to leverage the capabilities that we at Pianta have built in the domain of on-demand delivery and logistics. It presents us with a large canvas to create a much larger impact and to create it faster” Go-Jek, that boasts of over 20 million app downloads, started as a bike-taxi business, but soon diversified into food delivery, one-hour courier delivery, grocery delivery and even has aggregated trucks on its platform. Last month, it raised over $550 million in a new round of funding led by KKR and Warburg Pincus LLC.