Snapdeal Acquires Valley Mobile Storefront Startup MartMobi For Undisclosed Sum

India’s Jasper Infotech has acquired California-based mobile storefront startup MartMobi in a deal that could help attract thousands of small sellers to the New Delhi-based operator of Snapdeal.com, one of the country’s largest online shopping sites.

“Snapdeal acquires MartMobi,” the U.S. startup said on its website, but didn’t provide details. The deal “will give a fillip to our existing mobile capabilities,” Jasper co-founder and COO Rohit Bansal said, in a press release on Tuesday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

MartMobi helps businesses quickly create mobile sites and apps, a valuable service to small businesses that have limited physical reach on their own or resources to independently spend on coding, but could potentially sell to the world if showcased online.

India’s e-commerce companies are attempting to add new revenue streams by providing such services, including marketing and advertising services to the thousands of small- and medium-sized sellers that list with them. They have used the acquisition route to accelerate such plans.

Before MartMobi, Snapdeal acquired a mobile-payments startup Freecharge, and has invested in RupeePower, a financial technology company, and GoJavas, a logistics company. In March, Snapdeal’s Bangalore rival Flipkart acquired AdIQuity, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup that serves online advertisements.

MartMobi was one of the highest-ranked platforms on shopping carts such as Shopify and Yahoo, according to the startup's founders. The company’s technology automatically generates mobile and tablet websites, or mobile storefronts, as well as apps for iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones and tablets, saving development costs for online businesses, which could use its technology to build websites and apps in a way that required no coding skills, the company said at the time.

“Mobile sites and native apps are faster today than a year ago,” Satya Krishna Ganni, CEO of MartMobi, said in the press release, adding that mobile stores that used MartMobi’s technology loaded about 64 percent faster than normal stores.