LivingSocial Expands Daily Deals Empire; Buys Ensogo, GoNabit And DealKeren

Comment

Looks like LivingSocial is employing the same strategy for international expansion as its rival Groupon: by acquiring local daily deal sites to serve as a foundation for discount distribution on a global scale.

According to DailySocial, the company has moved to purchase DealKeren (operational in Indonesia), its parent company Ensogo (which offers daily deals in Thailand and the Philippines) as well as GoNabit (which operates in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait).

LivingSocial hasn’t (yet) formally announced the acquisitions, but the report is corroborated by news site CPI Financial (although the article, which you can find using Google News, is unavailable at this moment).

Update: the deals were just confirmed (see press release below)

Clearly, the fresh logos confirm the purchases of Ensogo and DealKeren (but not GoNabit).

We have no knowledge of the terms of the deals, but we’ll update as soon as we learn more.

Also read:

LivingSocial Financials Exposed: $2.9B Valuation, $50M In Revenue Per Month

LivingSocial Pulls A Groupon … And $200 Million Off The Table

LivingSocial Acquires SocialMedia For $3 Million

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — LivingSocial, the online source for handpicked experiences at a great value, today announced it has acquired Ensogo, the market-leading deal site in Thailand and the Philippines; DealKeren, an Ensogo company based in Indonesia; and GoNabit, a daily deal pioneer with a presence in four Middle Eastern countries. LivingSocial also introduced Daily Deals in the Netherlands.

These three acquisitions and the Netherlands launch bring the total number of countries in which LivingSocial operates to 21. The company’s reach now spans six of the seven continents. Ensogo, with members in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, marks the first LivingSocial acquisition in Asia.

“As with previous acquisitions, LivingSocial has again chosen to align with local companies that possess similar values and ways of doing business,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder, LivingSocial. “We are excited to enter the dynamic Asian market and our presence in the Middle East and the Netherlands further strengthens our strategic global efforts to bring LivingSocial values to members across the globe.”

Officially launched in June 2010, Ensogo is known as the No. 1 social shopping website in Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia and currently serves more than 800,000 members. It continues to gain massive popularity and trust among Asian consumers as the market share leader, and Ensogo members have saved more than $25 million USD in the past year. Ensogo is backed by Rebate Networks, a leading international VC specializing in the social commerce space.

GoNabit was co-founded by Dan Stuart and Sohrab Jahanbani in January 2010 and is currently the leading daily deal provider based in United Arab Emirates. The site also presents mom- and dad-approved offers, suitable for children and parents alike, with Dubai Family, as well as travel-specific deals through GoNabit Getaways. In addition to being the first group-buying site in the Middle East/North Africa, GoNabit is the first company of its kind to offer deals in Arabic.

Members in Abu Dhabi, Amman, Dubai, Beirut, Cairo and Sharjah Ajman have saved more than $5 million USD in the past year.

Ensogo, DealKeren and GoNabit users will enjoy the same deal-buying experience to which they are accustomed.

Terms of the deals were not released.

More TechCrunch

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

TechCrunch Minute: When did iPads get as expensive as MacBooks?

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

Mycocycle uses mushrooms to upcycle old tires and construction waste

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO

Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings…

Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s…

Meati Foods bites into another $100M amid growth to 7,000 retail locations

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows…

Lucid Bots secures $9M for drones to clean more than your windows

High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to…

Israeli startup Panax raises a $10M Series A for its AI-driven cash flow management platform

The European Union has deepened the investigation of Elon Musk-owned social network, X, that it opened back in December under the bloc’s online governance and content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act…

EU grills Elon Musk’s X about content moderation and deepfake risks

For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa…

Atlan scores $105M for its data control plane, as LLMs boost importance of data

It is estimated that about 2 billion people, especially those in lower- and middle-income countries, lack access to quality and affordable essential medicines. The situation is exacerbated by low-quality or even killer…

Axmed raises $2M from Founderful to streamline drug supply chains in underserved markets

For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has maintained a de facto monopoly on positioning, navigation and timing, because it’s cheap and already integrated into billions of devices around the…

Xona Space Systems closes $19M Series A to build out ultra-accurate GPS alternative

Bankruptcy lawyers representing customers impacted by the dramatic crash of cryptocurrency exchange FTX 17 months ago say that the vast majority of victims will receive their money back — plus interest. The…

FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interest

On Wednesday, Google launched its digital wallet in India with local integrations, nearly two years after the app was relaunched as a digital wallet platform in the U.S. As TechCrunch exclusively reported last month,…

Google Wallet is now available in India

Bluesky has launched a new product roadmap for the coming months. The decentralized social network said on Tuesday that it is planning to introduce direct messages, support for videos, improved…

Bluesky to add DMs, video support and in-app custom feed curation

Samsung Medison, a medical device unit of Samsung Electronics that specializes in developing diagnostic imaging devices, said on Wednesday it plans to acquire Sonio, a Paris-based startup that makes AI-powered software…

Samsung Medison to acquire French AI ultrasound startup Sonio for $92.7M

Kyle Kuzma is a lot of things. He’s a forward for the Washington Wizards NBA team and a 2020 NBA champion. He’s also a style icon — depending on who…

NBA champion Kyle Kuzma looks to bring his team mentality to Scrum Ventures