Paytm acquires Shifu, a personal assistance app, to improve user experience

Paytm, a mobile payment and commerce platform has recently acquired Shifu, which is a context-aware personal assistant application. Shifu mines the smartphone usage patterns of users and makes personalised and highly relevant recommendations to help them make their life easier. 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.

Talking about the acquisition, Kiran Vasireddy, Sr. Vice President, Paytm said, “Shifu has been quite popular as an intelligent task-managing application. By integrating their technology & behavioural modelling 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 behaviour based on past usage, location and other data points, our platform will be able to offer relevant recommendations to our users.”

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 personalisation in the Indian mobile commerce space.