BENGALURU: City-based online book retailer Sapna Infoway Private Limited on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Ishita Technologies, the parent company of Bookadda.com, Acadzone.com and Koolskool.com, for an undisclosed amount. The companies were last valued at 13 million USD.
Nijesh Shah, CEO of Sapna Infoway, said Ishita’s brands would integrate perfectly with sapnaonline.com. “With the experience of the Sapna Book House group and our operational capabilities, we can work with Bookadda.com to supply books in the shortest time possible,” he said.
Bookadda.com is a popular educational online book retailer in the north while Acadzone.com provides online training programmes for students. Koolskool is a business-to-business company dealing in school supplies directly with school managements and through them, to the parents of the students.
“Bookadda.com has the technology to offer 12.5 million titles. Sapna has 11 warehouses in the southern region and is very popular here. With bookadda, we have a scalable option which coupled with our operational capabilities would help us have a pan-India presence. Acadzone, being completely digital, will have no boundaries and we can deliver content in digital formats to students anywhere,” Shah said.
Sapnaonline.com, which is part of the Sapna Book House group, currently has tie-ups with 10,800 schools, which would help Koolskool.com as well, Shah said.
Hemant Kohli, CEO of Ishita Technologies, said, “The Sapna group understands regional and academic market very well besides having a physical presence on the ground. Selling books online is a tough task since you must have the technology to source, locate, list and ship millions of titles with many variations,” he said.
The brand names for all three companies will remain the same for now as the integration of the businesses into Sapnaonline is being worked out. However, Shah made it clear that the staff from the three companies will not be joining Sapnaonline.com at the moment. “Operational and technological aspects will be run by Sapnaonline.com teams,” he said.