Zomato raises fresh $37 million funding led by Sequoia along with Info Edge
By Prathamesh Patil
Deepinder Goyal founded restaurant discovery guide Zomato has raised $37 million in Series D funding from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge to launch 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.
Available across web, mobile, and print, Zomato provides in-depth information such as menus, directions, contact details, pictures, and user reviews, for over 160,000 restaurants in 11 countries with its India and UAE operation having achieved break even already. More than half of Zomato’s traffic is seen on its mobile apps which is a testimony to the fact that local search is moving to mobile very fast. Over the next two years, Zomato plans to expand to 22 more countries across Europe, South-East Asia, Australia and the Americas.
“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.” Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato.
With an aggressive tactics it aims to take on the likes of San Francisco-based Yelp which happens to be one of the most valued companies in this sector with a market capitalisation of over $4.5 billion.
Started as Foodiebay in July 2008 with a list of 1,200 restaurants in the Delhi NCR region, it was able to break even in June 2010 and rebranded itself as Zomato in November 2010. It has previously raised close to $16.5 million from Info Edge, owner of naukri.com. The current round of funding values Zomato at $125 million which helped Info Edge dilute its stake from 57.9% to 50.1%.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder of Info Edge 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.”
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 which is updated every three months.
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