Groupon Acquires Breadcrumb To Drive Point Of Sale Purchases For Local Merchants

Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN), one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the last decade, has been expanding rapidly both organically and through acquisitions. It has been on a start-up shopping spree in the past couple of months, snapping up start-ups like Uptake, Hyperpublic and Campfire Labs, and recently acquired Breadcrumb, which develops iOS based point-of-sales (POS) systems for restaurants. Breadcrumb was acquired for roughly $15 million, and is another acquisition by Groupon to become the “operating system for local commerce.” ^[1]

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Though Groupon has been mired in controversies in the recent past and its stock is trading near all-time low, it seems focused on its mission to serve local businesses and expand its range of offerings beyond daily deals. Breadcrumb’s offerings enable restaurants to accept orders wirelessly and offer advanced analytics to analyze sales and other transaction data and generate reports based on the results. It already had a sizable user base so Groupon not only gets the product and the team, which fit in quite well with its range of offerings, but also additional customers to which it can cross-sell its other services.

While Groupon’s stock may be down right now, we expect these moves to help diversify its revenue sources instead of depending on just daily deals, and eventually build a robust business.

The company leads the daily deals space where it competes with LivingSocial backed by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Offers, Yelp (NYSE:YELP) and countless clones, but is looking to expand its offerings in other categories to diversify revenues.

We currently have a $14 Trefis price estimate for Groupon, which stands nearly 30% above its current market price.

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1. Groupon acquires iOS point-of-sale app maker Breadcrumb, Fierce Mobile Content [↩]