Groupon On A Buying Spree: Buys Mobile Payment Specialist Kima Labs
Another acquisition for Groupon, and a sign of how the e-commerce company is getting more focused on mobile as a route to future growth: it has picked up Kima Labs, which makes mobile barcode reading app Barcode Hero and mobile payment app TapBuy.
Context & Ripple Effects
Groupon is barely three months past its November 2011 IPO, where shares closed the first day at $26.11, 30.6% above the $20 offer price, and the confirmed backdrop is uncomfortable: reported 'Groupon fatigue' among consumers and a stated need to fend off larger rivals while chasing profitability under Lefkofsky's oversight. The Kima Labs deal lands squarely in that tension — a small mobile-technology tuck-in rather than a growth-market bet.
It also fits a pattern already visible in the corpus: Groupon quietly acquired pre-launch startup Campfire Labs in December 2011 as a pure talent buy, so Kima Labs reads as a second consecutive acquisition aimed at building capability fast instead of developing it internally. The pickup across TechCrunch, AllThingsD, VentureBeat, The Next Web and others signals how closely the market is watching whether post-IPO Groupon can pivot from email-blast deals to mobile commerce.
First-order effects
- Kima Labs' team and its two products — barcode-scanning app Barcode Hero and mobile payment app TapBuy — move inside Groupon, giving it in-house mobile checkout technology rather than a dependency on third-party payment tools.
Second-order effects
- With TapBuy's technology, Groupon gains the pieces to let merchants accept and redeem offers directly on mobile devices, tightening its merchant relationships and putting it in closer contact with the standalone mobile-payments startups courting the same local merchants.
- Rival deal platforms face pressure to match the mobile capability quickly, since Groupon's scale means any checkout advantage compounds across its existing merchant base.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Campfire Labs for talent, Kima Labs for mobile payments — Groupon is structurally repositioning from a daily-deals publisher into a mobile commerce platform, using post-IPO resources to acquire its way there.
- For the deals industry broadly, persistent consumer fatigue makes the email-driven model look finite, pushing consolidation of mobile technology into the hands of the few players large enough to buy it.
The trend: Daily-deal companies are using their IPO-window capital to acquire mobile payments and commerce technology, converting a fatigued email-coupon model into device-first local commerce platforms.