Zomato raises $ 37 m from Sequoia Capital and Info Edge to fund global expansion
Monday, 11 November 2013 00:00
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Popular restaurant search service extends presence to Brazil, Turkey, and Indonesia
Zomato, the popular restaurant search service, has announced a fresh round of funding of USD 37 million from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge. This takes Zomato’s total funding to over USD 53 million; Zomato had earlier raised USD 16.5 million from Info Edge over four rounds of funding.
Zomato has also announced the launch of its services in three new countries – Brazil (Sao Paulo), Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara), and Indonesia (Jakarta). In these three countries, Zomato will be available in local languages as well – Portuguese, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesia respectively. In addition to these, Zomato has also expanded its services within UK from three cities to five, with the inclusion of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Rich content approach
Zomato believes that menus, pictures, and maps are as important as reviews when it comes down to a customer’s decision-making process about where to eat. It follows a rich-content approach to restaurant search, and has a team that collects menu cards, clicks pictures and gets mapping information on its own. Reviews and ratings on Zomato are provided by users.
Zomato updates menu cards every three months across all restaurants, and provides updated scanned menu cards for over 160,000 restaurants across the 11 countries of its presence. Users can access all this information for free on Zomato’s website available at www.zomato.com or download Zomato’s beautifully designed mobile apps for iOS, Android or Windows.
Headquartered in New Delhi, and started five years ago, Zomato employs over 600 people across 35 cities in 11 countries. Over the next two years, Zomato plans to expand to 22 more countries across Europe, South-East Asia, Australia and the Americas.
Exciting phase
Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said, “This is an exciting phase for us. We believe that we can disrupt restaurant search with our rich content-driven model. This financing will help us develop a product that will change the way people look for restaurant recommendations around them. We are excited to partner with Sequoia Capital as our venture partner to help us succeed internationally, and we can look forward to seeing Zomato in many more countries over the next couple of years.”
“At Sequoia Capital, we have been championing the cause of Indian companies globalising at a rapid pace. Many of our services and enterprise software investments are already global category leaders. Zomato is the first Indian consumer internet company to build a significant international footprint, and we have made this investment because of our strong conviction in the founders, the world-class product they’ve built, and their ambitious global vision,” said Sequoia Capital India Advisors Managing Director Mohit Bhatnagar. Info Edge Founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani said, “Zomato is one of the finest consumer Internet businesses to come out of India. It has a great team, a great brand, a super user experience, a dominant market share, excellent revenue scale-up with a known path to profit, and a global opportunity. We are excited to partner with them to build a world-class restaurant search engine.”
Zomato, founded in 2008, is a restaurant guide providing in-depth information for over 160,000 restaurants in 35 cities across 11 countries. Zomato’s core content features include menus, photos and geocoded coordinates for restaurants. Other community features include reviews, ratings and the ability to follow other users’ recommendations on Zomato. Apart from the website and apps, Zomato is also available in print in select cities in India, with versions for other cities on the way.
Zomato was started by IIT Delhi alumni in July 2008 for Delhi NCR and has expanded its services to 35 cities across India, UK, UAE, South Africa, New Zealand, the Philippines, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Qatar.
