Chennai, NFAPost: Online automobile transactional marketplace Droom has acquired Delhi-NCR based AR startup Visiolab Ideas for an undisclosed amount.
Droom introduces an AR-VR lab with this acquisition to enhance the customer experience in their vehicle buying research. Under the acquisition, both co-founders of the company will join the Droom team.
Droom will leverage technological innovations powered by Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality in addition to tools using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Big Data to offer new products and solutions for automobile commerce.
With this acquisition, Droom will provide a live virtual tour of vehicles to customers who can experience it in 3D. Droom allocated Rs 50 crore last year towards building new and innovative products using AI, AR, and VR.
Droom Chief Strategy Officer Akshay Singh said, “We are excited to welcome the Visiolab Ideas team to become a part of Droom. At Droom we have built Industry-leading technology-focused products like OBV, Eco, Droom History, Droom Discovery, and Droom Credit for bridging the gap in buying and selling vehicles online.”
“This acquisition will further enhance our capabilities in offering delightful customer experiences and a completely online vehicle buying experience,” he added.
“Augmented Reality is the future, not just in the automotive sector, but for education, healthcare, and almost all of the major fields in the market. That is what got us in this field and gave us the motivation to develop the technology that could bring the showroom experience to your doorstep, in the comfort of your homes. We are delighted that Droom gave us a platform to contribute towards India’s online auto marketplace,” said Visiolab Ideas founder & CEO Navdeep Singh.
Droom is the largest hyperlocal market and the fourth-largest ecommerce company in India in terms of GMV at present. The acquisition of Visiolabs Idea and the establishment of its AR Lab will further strengthen Droom’s position as one of the most innovative automotive and ecommerce organisations in India and across the globe.
Droom is an AI and data science-driven online transactional platform, which offers 21st-century experience in buying and selling of used and new automobiles in India and other emerging markets. Droom has built an entire eco-system around used automobiles for the digital economy, including Orange Book Value (used vehicle pricing engine), Eco (1,000+ points vehicle inspection), History (history records for used vehicles), Discovery (dozens of pre-buying research tools) and Credit (India’s first and only marketplace for a used auto loan and dealer financing).
Droom not only caters to individual buyers and sellers, dealers, and large enterprises for buying and selling but also manages the entire life cycle and all automobile ancillary services. Droom has four marketplace formats i.e. B2C, C2C, C2B, and B2B, and three pricing formats – Fixed Price, Best Offer, and Auction. The platform offers a wide range of categories from bicycle to plane and all automobile services such as Warranty, RSA, Insurance, and Auto Loan.
With 80% market share of the automobile transactions online, Droom is India’s largest automobile platform online and 4th largest ecommerce company. Besides India, Droom is available in Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. While OBV is available in 38 countries globally, making OBV the world’s number one benchmark pricing engine.
Droom has a presence in over 1,031 cities across India (India’s largest hyper-local marketplace), 350K auto dealers (largest auto dealer platform in World), over 45 million monthly visitors, nearly 12 million app downloads, and 6.5 million Facebook followers.
Droom is headquartered in India with subsidiaries in the United States. The company has so far raised close to $125 million over six rounds of funding. Some of the prominent investors are Lightbox, Beenext, Beenos, Digital Garage, Toyota Tsusho Corporation, and Integrated Assets Management.
