In June, Amazon made its biggest purchase ever with the acquisition of the Whole Foods supermarket chain for $$13.7 billion. With this purchase, Amazon has the staff and strategic locations to provide its food delivery service, better known as Amazon Fresh.
What kind of companies are you investing in?
Mainly the US, although it is opening up to new markets.
Amazon has invested in a total of 17 companies in the last two years. Most of them are US companies, although in 2017 it bought a Saudi Arabian company (Souq.com, a leader in e-commerce in the Middle East) and an Irish company (GameSparks, a firm that provided logistical support and software tools to video game developers).
Young companies, no more than 10 years old, which have previously received support from investors.
With the exception of the latest acquisition (Whole Foods, a supermarket chain, 1997), the companies acquired by Amazon are young companies. A clear example is Angel.ai, a company founded in 2015, which offers chatbots for websites. This company had already received a $ 8M round of funding led by General Catalyst Partners.
Several of the companies bought by Amazon had previously received investment rounds, such as Elemental Technologies ($45M). With this deal, the company founded by Jeff Bezos complemented its cloud infrastructure offering for mobile video services. The price of the deal was around $500M. Another company that had received strong investor support was Graphiq,($32M) a data aggregation and visualisation company.
Software elements characteristic of Amazon purchases
14 of the 17 companies bought by Amazon in the last two years are software companies.
Thus we find artificial intelligence companies such as Orbeus, which has developed a photo-recognition technology based on a powerful type of artificial intelligence on neural networks and has launched the consumer application ReKognition. The ecommerce giant is investing heavily in the artificial intelligence capabilities to automate its warehouse operations, improve supply systems and add new products to its cloud services offering.
It has also invested in data processing companies such as Annapurna Labs and Graphiq, video companies such as Elemental Technologies and mobile payments company Emvantage.
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