Bigbasket acquires Agrima Infotech 🛒

What happened — Tata-backed grocery-delivery player Bigbasket acquired a deep-tech startup called Agrima Infotech, to bolster its retail-tech capabilities as it tries to pull off an omnichannel expansion strategy.

Building quietly under the radar in Kochi for over 11 years, Agrima basically sells a roster of tools that digitize various aspects of running an offline retail operation. For example, their image-recognition platform helps identify and classify perishable products (e.g. Apples vs. Oranges). Then there’s a payment and AI based self-checkout system. There’s a retail data analytics platform. Here’s a look at the portfolio.

Anyway, owning Agrima’s technology in-house could be extremely valuable as Big Basket doubles down on omni-channel and plans the buildout of 200+ physical stores nationwide by the end of next year.