An anonymous tipster tells us Zappedy, a company that offered various technology products for local businesses, has been acquired by Groupon, information that turns out to be correct according to a message posted on the former’s website (which, sadly, hasn’t been archived by the Wayback Machine).
There’s isn’t much information about Zappedy on the Web altogether, but here’s what I’ve been scraping together thanks to my phenomenal Web searching skills:
Zappedy was founded in early 2010 and was backed by Innovation Endeavors, the investment firm founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. According to its AngelList profile, Zappedy was funded by IE’s Dror Berman and Corey Ford, specifically.
Bling Nation co-CEO and founding partner of investment firm MECK Wences(lao) Casares also turns up. And according to their LinkedIn profiles, Innovation Endeavors’ (and TokBox founder) Ron Hose and Project Slice co-founder Harpinder Singh Madan were also advising Zappedy.
Update: we’re told that Dror Berman and Ron Hose were actually the ones backing Zappedy.
This is how the startup is described on the Innovation Endeavors website:
Zappedy powers revolutionary applications that help brick and mortar merchants better understand, attract and retain customers.
Using data gathered from a mixture of direct feeds and credit card aggregators, Zappedy enables next-generation commerce, entertainment and mobile advertising applications that recognize customers’ offline purchases as well as their online activities.
Notably, it looks like Zappedy is associated with Startup Chile, a program of the Chilean Government to attract early stage entrepreneurs and sway them into starting their businesses in Chile.
You can find a short interview with Zappedy co-founder Na’ama Moran here (also embedded below).
From what I can gather, Zappedy basically enabled small local businesses to easily create a website and advertise online through social media and daily deal websites simply by sending emails. Groupon likely acquired the company for its team but possibly also for the technology (to be able to offer more tools for merchants who don’t have a strong online presence yet).
Update 2: we’re told by someone in the know that the above was Zappedy’s previous offering, and that they’ve since pivoted to ‘something else’, presumably closer to the service as described on the Innovation Endeavors website. Hence, the video below is no longer relevant to Zappedy’s most recent product proposition, and apparently Moran was wrongly described as a Zappedy co-founder.
Zappedy was co-founded by Francisco Larrain, Evan Macmillan, Daniel Pérez Rada and Ricardo Zilleruelo-Ramos (at least according to their respective LinkedIn profiles). Another interesting name that turns up when perusing LinkedIn is Brad Griffith, a former business developer at LOLapps and, before that, a senior financial analyst at Google.
I’ve contacted Groupon, Zappedy and Innovation Endeavors, but since it’s weekend and not exactly the perfect time to reach people, I don’t expect to get more information rapidly.
For a list of acquisitions by Groupon, check their CrunchBase profile (left sidebar).