Lookup builds an online platform for local offline retailers

With the booming e-commerce space, there has been a rise in conversational apps. These bring to you the best of what is  available online, but what about things that you still rely on local stores for. Well, for that, there’s Lookup, available on web, Android and iOS. This startup aims at becoming Google of the offline world. It recommends stores and lets you shop from anywhere nearby and also get the product delivered. It is founded by Deepak Ravindran, a serial entrepreneur whose first stint at building a company was at the age of 17. Lookup is now a team of 90 people working in the several branches spread across four cities namely, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune. “Though people may have gotten used to shopping in malls or e-commerce sites, they still run to the local drugstore for stomach flu pills or the BP medication that they run out of. Most of the people were still using the traditional way of calling stores. Once, I stumbled upon my mother who was using Whatsapp to communicate with a store in order to buy groceries. This is when I thought of a solution - What if a message sent before you set out for a shop told you if the pharmacy has that pill in stock or not? Or what if you can take a picture of the doctor’s prescription with your phone and send it to a nearby shop? And communicate with them without sharing any confidential data like your phone number? That’s how I came up with the main idea of Lookup,” explains Ravindran. Lookup gets commission by receiving a share of the revenue through orders from the businesses. It also raised $2.5 million Series A from Vinod Khosla’s personal fund Khosla Impact. It has raised a total of $382,000 in seed funding from Kris Gopalakrishnan (co-founder, Infosys), Teruhito Sato (founder,Beenos,Japan), DeNA (Japan) and MKS Switzerland. “Today, local retailers have no way to beat the huge discounts offered by major e-commerce ventures without adapting to better technology. Lookup is the simplest commerce tool which makes these retailers visible online and receive traffic,” he adds. Lookup targets households as its primary consumers and also uses emojis on the chat platform to connect with the younger generation. Lookup is now working at making it easy and simple to use the app. “We are building more relevant features in the Lookup Biz App which will empower SMBs to manage their stores online with one tap accesses to payment, logistics and more importantly, Lookup’s hyperlocal ad network,” he further explains. Lookup has also embraced the wave of bot technology. So, around 80 percent chat sessions are handled by buddies (customer support) or the store itself and 20 percent are automated. “Lookup follows the example of the cockpit model of an airplane, wherein some of the operations are automated by the aircraft itself and the rest are manually handled by the pilot, he adds.