U.K. startup Whisk has now acquired a competing company called Avocando in order to expand its services across Europe. Whisk already operates in the U.S., U.K., and Austrailia. The company is responsible for the business-to-business database platform behind a wealth of applications serving more than 100 million customers. More directly, the firm works to capitalize on services that tie other companies and applications such as Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, and Tesco, to recipes. One prominent example of how that works can be found in Samsung’s range of smart refrigerators. The appliances can analyze what users have in their fridges, what their preferences are, and offer suggestions for recipes. However, Whisk has also been used in the opposite direction, offering shopping options to users who have found a new recipe they’d like to try out. Finally, Whisk allows for the creation of personalized recipe feeds and meal planning beyond what’s in a user’s fridge.
The acquisition’s financials have not been discussed in detail but Whisk will reportedly be absorbing technologies, business customer base, app integrations, development teams, and founders from Avocando as part of the deal. Avocando is a German company that had competed directly with Whisk and the expansion mentioned above is one step in a wider growth plan. The latter company is working to become the primary data platform for its types of services on a global scale. Financial exchanges in the deal are thought to have been done in cash, but not many details have been given about the timeframe of the expansion either. However, the company has said that Germany, France, and Spain combine to create a larger e-commerce grocery market than either the U.S. or the U.K. What’s more, the regions are also representative of the largest online recipe usage figures in the world.
So it makes sense that the company would start in those regions when it comes to global expansion plans and that it would pursue the acquisition of a major competitor in that space. By acquiring Avocando, the company begins that expansion with a foothold in Europe and a user-base already in place. Business users and visitors to sites or users of apps that utilize such databases likely won’t notice much difference. Over time, however, the acquisition could present at least one perk to end users as the experience of using e-commerce in conjunction with recipes and the IoT could become much more consistent as a result of the newly announced tie-up.