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Flipkart's digital payment subsidiary PhonePe announced the acquisition of Zopper Retail – a hyperlocal Point of Sale (POS) platform for small and medium businesses. This comes with the company's strategy to aggressively ramp up its offline business and for making it a ubiquitous payment method for smartphone users. PhonePe, last year developed its own PoS device based on Bluetooth technology to process and boost its offline transactions.

Zopper's CEO Neeraj Jain has joined the team of PhonePe after the acquisition. 32 other employees of Zopper will also be joining the PhonePe team.

To take on the rivals and grow in the market, Flipkart is providing PhonePe with the obligatory financial lift. In the month of March, 18' PhonePe had received Rs 518.22 Crore ($80 million) in a fresh funding round from Singapore-based Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd.

Sameer Nigam, CEO, PhonePe, said, "Zopper has a very strong technology and innovation DNA, and Neeraj and team are also a great culture fit for PhonePe. Zopper Retail is specifically designed to meet the needs of millions of small retailers in India, and their strategy ties in very well with our overall vision of making digital payments universally accepted across the country."

Earlier, Zopper Retail raised $20 million from investors like Blume Ventures, Tiger Global and Nirvana Ventures Advisors. Founded by Neeraj Jain and Surjendu Kuila in the year 2010, Zopper has hinged twice in the last eight years. In the year 2015, Zopper pivoted and split its business into two distinct divisions – Zopper Retail (a PoS platform for offline merchants) and (Zopper Assure) an extended warranty solutions unit for electronics purchased at offline outlets. However, after the acquisition of Zopper Retail, Zopper Assure will continue being led by Kuila.

At present, Zopper claims to have a network of three lakh offline and online merchant outlets covering food, travel, groceries, movie tickets, etc.

With this new acquisition, PhonePe will hope that it will help the firm in the intensely competitive payments platform segment. Paytm and Google's Tez are amongst its biggest competitors in this segment. Last year, Flipkart committed to invest $500 Million in PhonePe to fight off the competition.