Groupon Acquires Its Way Into Israel, South Africa And India

Groupon is determined to launch daily deal sites in markets all over the world, as we’ve seen in the past. This morning, the social commerce company announced that it has acquired SoSasta (India), Grouper (Israel) and Twangoo (South Africa).

Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

SoSasta has only been around for about three months, but already offers daily deals in 11 Indian cities, according to Groupon. Grouper was launched in Israel almost a year ago and primarily serves Tel Aviv, while Twangoo covers the most cities of any deal site in South Africa, the company adds.

Grouper for one is rumored to have been acquired for $15 million, according to local media (update: Globes, for one, pegs it at $8 million).

All three daily deal sites will transition to the Groupon brand name and site design in coming months, and will serve deals in the local communities’ primary languages: English in India and South Africa and Hebrew in Israel.

Groupon has earlier acquired three deal websites in Asia (uBuyiBuy, Beeconomic and Atlaspost) in an effort to expand its reach across East and Southeast Asia. In 2010, Groupon also expanded to Europe, Latin America, Russia and Japan through acquisitions.

They don’t only shop outside of the United States, though – Groupon also moved to acquire San Mateo-based Ludic Labs, the local marketing services startup behind offerfoundry.com and diddit.com, early December 2010.

Groupon says it now employs more than 4,000 people worldwide. The company just yesterday closed on a whopping $950 million in funding.

With that kind of money in the bank, it isn’t particularly challenging to get very acquisitive, and rolling up smaller, local players modeled after its own success happens to be a big part of Groupon’s international growth strategy. Expect more of these.