Groupon acquires Zappedy, a local merchants site

Details are scant on the new deal from Groupon, gearing up for its $750 million IPO

Local business-focused e-commerce company Zappedy announced over the weekend that it has been acquired by Groupon. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Besides a message posted on Zappedy’s website and a small note on the site of one of its investors, Innovation Endeavors, there has been no official announcement of the acquisition. I’ve reached out to both Groupon and Innovation Endeavors to learn more.

It’s worth noting that Innovation Endeavors is an early-stage venture capital firm founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Here’s a description of the company from the Innovation Endeavors website:

Zappedy powers revolutionary applications that help brick and mortar merchants better understand, attract and retain customers. Using data gathered from a mixture of direct feeds and credit card aggregators, Zappedy enables next-generation commerce, entertainment and mobile advertising applications that recognize customers’ offline purchases as well as their online activities.

And here’s all of that translated into a beautiful elevator pitch by co-founder Na’ama Moran: “[Zappedy] is a Web solution that enables local merchants to get their products and services online in less than five minutes.” (via a video interview embedded below.)

A little bit Posterous, a little bit ReachLocal, Zappedy offered a service by which businesses could set up a listing as easily as sending an email. Moran says that merchants could just email her company with a description of their services, deals they offer, related pictures and whatever else they’d like included, and Zappedy would create an online listing for the business.

Why Groupon would want to acquire Zappedy is obvious only because they live in the same space, but it’s as yet unclear whether the daily deals giant has any intention of carrying on Zappedy’s local-to-online listing service. It could just as well be that Groupon only wanted to hire some solid talent, as Zynga typically does when purchasing game studios.

Groupon filed for its IPO in early June and is hoping to raise as much as $750 million.