Amazon has been quietly pushing the bar forward to roll out Amazon Go-powered instant checkout stores across the United States and United Kingdom. Little is, however known that it has also been moving the needle to expand the technology into another very key market for the business: India.

According to TechCrunch, Amazon quietly snatched the founders of a cashierless store startup out of the south of India, hired at least 100 more people to build out the effort, and is still hiring more to build out the team further.

These include support and software engineers, embedded system experts, computer vision scientists, and even program managers-all of whom now indicate on LinkedIn profiles that they are working on Amazon Go in the country. Current Amazon recruitment posts indicate that the company is bringing others on board to join the effort.

Amazon has set up Just Walk Out technology operations units across cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chennai to work extensively on Amazon Go stores. Those operations are being underpinned by what looks like a quiet acquisition the Seattle-headquartered company made of Nayasale Retail, the parent of a startup called Watasale. Watasale is/was a Kochi, Kerala-based startup that reportedly became India's first Amazon Go-style cashierless store the company launched back in January 2018 in the South Indian state.

Employees at Watasale have signed up with Amazon, but it's not precisely clear if Amazon has "acquired" or "acqui-hired" the business. Watasale's website remains operational, but most links-there are a few, including to its app on Google Play, and descriptions of how its tech actually works-are dead.

The site highlights a lot of different technologies it was developing around the idea of automated check-outs. It points out that the startup had developed technology for operating "micro stores": vending-style machines working using smartphones and QR codes that could be placed into any shop.

It was also working on bigger whole-store implementations to which, according to the site, leveraged cameras and computer vision and "sensor fusion" to understand shoppers' actions, combined big data analytics and deep learning to gain insights into consumer behavior, with the idea being to build more complete pictures around purchasing patterns that would be more complicated-if not impossible-to ascertain from more traditional shopping environments.

In both cases, Watasale's technology enables customers to pick items and have them automatically charged and paid for through a prepaid wallet - all of it done through Watasale, without the need for a cashier or a physical check-out process.

Other reports also show that Watasale was designing more technology, for example delivery services run by robots. According to the website, automated delivery was a "first in class completely autonomous online delivery concept in the making" where orders from Watasale shops were going to be dispatched by robots to a requested location somewhere close by.

We are using a combination of touch sensors, AI and computer vision—pretty much the same technology as in a self-driven car," said Richu Jose, who at the time of this interview was COO of Watasale. He made these remarks in a pitch-style interview published in Indian publication StartupTalky. The startup actually started working on its technology in 2015, before Amazon Go even existed, but apparently took credit from the e-commerce giant for basically confirming their hunch that the space was worthwhile.

"We began working on the technology in the beginning of 2015," said Subhash Sasidharakurup, who had been the CEO and CTO of Watasale. "It was after the announcement by Amazon that they were going to [launch] Amazon Go, similar to our technology, that we were reinstated about our correct direction."

By January 2020, according to their LinkedIn profiles, Jose, Sasidharakurup, and another director of Watasale, Subhash Shanoop Sivadas joined Amazon. Two other directors of the startup of the US domicile company, Dileep Elipe Jacob and Vinci George Mathews left the board in December 2021 according to filings with Indian regulatory body Registrar of Companies.

Amazon and the directors of Watasale did not respond to requests for comment about what, exactly, Amazon has bought here, but filings indicate that on January 31, 2022, Nayasale Retail asked the Registrar of Companies to delete its name from the registers under section 248 (2) of the Companies Act, 2013. Those same filings seem to suggest that the company was self-funded:.

A source briefed on the matter told TechCrunch that employees at the company were given a choice to join Amazon and work with the team building the technology behind Amazon Go stores. How many people will make the move is unclear, but it is not clear whether that is to build technology for stores in existing Go markets like the US and UK, or for India; nor is it clear what the timing might be for a launch if it's the latter of those.

Amazon Go was first introduced in beta, launched in Seattle, in 2016. The company then later expanded its partially automated stores across the rest of the U.S. in cities such as Chicago, San Francisco and New York, and also in London. The company in 2020 started selling its store cashierless technology to other retailers.

While Amazon is indeed pulling back on some of its brick-and-mortar retail strategy, it appears to be doubling down on stores that are built around its more cutting-edge cashierless tech. Currently, there are 28 Go in the U.S. alone, with two Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go stores that were launched in November last year.

Opening brick-and-mortar stores is a natural extension of Amazon's larger play in India, to which the company has deployed over $6.5 billion in order to grow its presence in the country.

Even though e-commerce is no question growing in this country that is very mobile-friendly and tech-savvy, brick-and-mortar retail is a massive business still. According to IBEF, citing Payoneer's data, e-commerce accounted for 4 percent of both food and non-food retail in 2020, and its share would rise only to 8% by 2025.

That leaves much on the table for physical commerce. To that end, Amazon has aggressively explored partnerships with neighborhood stores in recent years. That is, however, a long bet for the company. A report by investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein said last month that Amazon's spending for growth in India has made its local division's prospects of turning a profit "elusive."

And Amazon faces a tough fight with Walmart-owned Flipkart, as well as Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail, which has been expanding of late and outwitted the U.S. firm’s attempt to acquire India’s second biggest retail chain Future Retail.

Yet Amazon is working hard to increase its presence in the country, which is expected to double its e-commerce spending to over $130 billion by 2025, according to Bernstein’s estimates.

Except for merely inking partnerships with local stores, Amazon has recently invested stakes into the physical retail chains of the country.

In 2018, Amazon and private equity firm Samara Capital acquired Aditya Birla Group's food and grocery retail chain More to penetrate offline retail in the country. The investment arm of the U.S. company also bought in 2017 a 5% equity (PDF) in departmental store chain Shoppers Stop. However, it is not clear if either of the moves have enabled Amazon to gain traction with consumers who constitute the majority of their expenditures in brick and mortar stores.

Ankur Bisen, senior partner and head of retail, consumer products, and food products and services at consulting firm Technopak, told TechCrunch that what develops the Indian ecosystem socially, politically and policy-wise determines a lot of what Amazon does.

His estimates are a little rosier than those of IBEF: As much as 85% of the retail sector in the country still comes under traditional retail, he said. Nothing has so far impacted the sustainability of local neighborhood stores in the country, he added.