Gaia Smart Cities Acquires IoT Division of netCORE Solutions

In a joint statement, Gaia Smart Cities, an Indian start-up in the field of City Scale IOT technology solutions and netCORE Solutions, a leader in marketing technology & enterprise communication, announced that Gaia has acquired the IOT division of netCORE Solutions while netCORE will invest in Gaia and continue to support the company through its rapid growth period.

This acquisition will create a leading technology and innovation enterprise, differentiated by its ability to deliver ground-breaking products rapidly. With the Government of India’s ‘Make-in-India’ and ‘Digital India’ programmes supporting Indian companies to build intellectual property and design cutting edge electronics, software and telecommunications, Gaia is one of the few companies actively pursuing R&D in these domains.

With this acquisition, Gaia is poised to become one of the fastest growing end-to-end IOT companies with solutions for both Industrial automation and Smart Cities. The acquisition will generate multiple pro-consumer and pro-competitive benefits to existing marquee customers like India’s largest Dairy companies like Amul, Paras, Parag Dairies; India’s largest Cement company ACC Cement; Beverages company like Penrod Ricard and many cold chains, warehouses, retail stores across the country. With solutions running in 24 paying customers and pilots across another 10, coupled with Gaia’s product customers in Smart Metering, Smart Cities and analytics.

“We were drawn towards the strong technical team, a robust technical platform and extremely focused approach of the netCORE IOT team. We found great synergies with our own Smart Cities platforms and solutions like Smart Metering and Smart Tracking”, said Dr. Sumit D. Chowdhury, the Founder & CEO of Gaia Smart Cities (Former President of Reliance Jio). Dr. Chowdhury is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and Carnegie Mellon.

The rebranded and upgraded cloud-based platform INSIGHT developed by netCORE Solutions, will further enhance the capability of the enterprises to rapidly deploy Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and gadgets to increase their visibility of plant and machinery performance, warehouse and logistics performance, retail store performance condition monitoring. Combined with the right Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning solutions that Gaia is building, it is inclined to bring in significant insight and business benefit to the customers.  These solutions can be easily adapted to support cities in their journey to become more measurable and transparent and thus ‘smart’.

“We continue to believe in the potential of IoT and Smart Cities and have found that the leadership and ideas of Gaia are better and can be aligned to grow this business and support the customers that we already have. We will continue to stay invested with Gaia as the country moves ahead with its various Smart Cities and demand for the solutions developed across the world”, according to  Mr. Rajesh Jain, Founder and Managing Director of netCORE Solutions.

Nine Rivers Capital Advisors acted as the sole financial advisor to the transaction. Mr. Nimesh Shah, Managing Director & Co-Founder, Nine Rivers Capital said, “As part of our Technology and Digital practice, we are very upbeat about rapid adoption of IOT solutions within the country. We see a big synergy in Gaia Smart Cities scaling up what Netcore started as a pioneering effort 2 years back.”