Paytm acquires Shifu to offer a more personalized user experience

New Delhi: Paytm, India`s largest mobile payment and commerce platform acquires Shifu, a context-aware personal assistant application.

Shifu mines the smartphone usage patterns of users and makes personalized and highly relevant recommendations to them.

Through the acquisition, Paytm aims to leverage the tech infrastructure of Shifu to enrich the customer experience it offers to its users.

The 20-member team behind Shifu has also come on board across various verticals at Paytm.Speaking on the acquisition, Kiran Vasireddy, Sr. Vice President, Paytm said, "Shifu has been quite popular as an intelligent task-managing application.

By integrating their technology and behavioral modeling with Paytm app, we will be able to offer a highly intuitive and personalized experience to our users."

"This acquisition will give further impetus to our focus on Artificial intelligence, which will bring the next wave of disruption in ecommerce. By predicting user behavior based on past usage, location and other data points, our platform will be able to offer relevant recommendations to our users," added Kiran.

Shifu, created by Delhi-based The Signals, is a free task-managing app.

Once the app is installed, it analyses the usage patterns of the device owner and makes a variety of suggestions based on a predictive algorithm.

While the app will continue to be available in its original form after the acquisition, the technology behind it will be used by Paytm to change the paradigm of personalization in the Indian mobile commerce space.