Canadian company set to acquire Arlington Basket-based grocery app | ARLnow
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Two companies that help grocers and shoppers get the best deals have reached a deal of their own.
Canadian Society for Artificial Intelligence Fobi is about to acquire Basketan Arlington-based startup’s grocery pricing app that lets users compare in-store and online prices for items, according to a press release.
Basket, which was developed by Grocery Shopping Labs, provides its data to product manufacturers and retailers so they can understand shopping trends, such as how often shoppers search for products at different stores and what drives purchasing decisions. Vancouver-based Fobi provides retail, sports, entertainment and tourism data insights to its clients, which include major corporations around the world.
“Basketball has always been about removing blindfolds from shoppers to help save them money and time, and simultaneously providing shoppers’ insights to some of the best [consumer packaged goods] CPG brands and retailers,” Neil Kataria, CEO of Grocery Shopping Labs, said in the release. “Now with Fobi, we can dramatically grow our audience, delivering more value to shoppers and more value to the CPG brands we work with.”
Basket was launched in 2014 in DC and moved to Clarendon in 2016. The company has raised $12 million in capital and has hundreds of thousands of users.
The shopping cart allows users to scan barcodes of their favorite products to create smart shopping lists that compare product prices at various local stores, online stores, and delivery companies, as well as the cost of the entire list in all stores. Cart data combined with Qples by Fobi Grocery Coupon Network The app will provide users with a better experience and maximize cost savings for brands, the statement said.
“Shoppers can simply scan the product barcode and see if there are any coupons available for that product from Qples by Fobi, and if there are, they can be applied automatically at checkout,” according to the communicated.
The idea for Basket came to Kataria as a child, cutting coupons with his family and comparing his grocery list at five stores near him, he previously told ARLnow. As an adult, he realized how much money he was wasting by not comparing prices and began aggregating data generated by shoppers.
The app created a community of shoppers who shared grocery store prices across the United States
“I’m excited about the opportunity we have with Fobi to transform the grocery industry with price visibility and shopper data, but I’m also excited to take this transformation to other industries next,” Kataria said in the statement.
The acquisition of Basket comes at just the right time, because inflation is rising and manufacturers and consumers are even more interested in saving money, Fobi CEO Rob Anson said in the release.
“This deal immediately increases our revenue streams and immediately increases our addressable audience and the amount of buyer data we have access to,” he said. “Our combined AI and Big Data capabilities will now enable a new era of one-to-one marketing at scale with unprecedented data analytics and valuable campaign performance and measurement insights for the retail ecosystem. .”
