Bloomberg News

LivingSocial Buys Online Ordering System Provider Onosys

By Douglas MacMillan and Ari Levy
April 26, 2012

LivingSocial.com, the second- biggest provider of online daily deals, said it acquired Onosys, a maker of ordering software, as it seeks to offer more services to companies.

The Onosys team will join the merchant solutions group at LivingSocial, which is run by Dickson Chu, according to Brendan Lewis, a spokesman. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

LivingSocial is expanding beyond the daily-deals market, where it goes head-to-head with market leader Groupon Inc. (GRPN) Onosys, based in Cleveland, specializes in technology that helps restaurants receive orders over the Web and mobile phones. Its clients include Papa John’s International Inc. (PZZA), Panera Bread Co. (PNRA) and Applebee’s International Inc.

Following Groupon’s initial public offering last year, Washington-based LivingSocial lined up $400 million in funding to give it a valuation of about $6 billion, a person familiar with the matter said in December. The company was in talks last year about raising $1 billion in an IPO before tapping the private markets instead.

The deal provider lost more than $500 million last year, Amazon.com Inc. said in a regulatory filing in February. Amazon is a backer of LivingSocial.

To contact the reporters on this story: Douglas Macmillan in New York at dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net; Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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