13 September 2017, India:
Foodtech startup Zomato has announced the acquisition of hyperlocal delivery startup Runnr to strengthen its delivery business and compete with Swiggy. The amount of the deal was undisclosed.
Founded in 2015 by former Ola executive Mohit Kumar, along with Arpit Dave, Vatsal Singhal, Aravind Reddy, Gnanesh Chillukuri and Mukunda NS, Runnr essentially handled last mile delivery for businesses.
Zomato co-founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal said, “For the record, we have always maintained that the most cost-efficient delivery fleet is the restaurant’s own, where they can utilise the same staff during off-peak hours for back-of-house and marketing activities. That belief is still intact. Keeping that in mind, Runnr will continue to function as an independent logistics company (owned by Zomato) offering the full stack of logistical services to players other than Zomato as well – e.g. pharma, grocery, e-commerce, etc. This will ensure that the delivery fleet capacity that we build operates on a positive unit economics level while serving the mega-peaks in the food delivery business.”
Emotionally, the deal has been in place for a couple of months now, and both the teams have been working closely with each other quite some time now. So much so, Mohit Kumar, the Founder & CEO of Runnr, has been living in Delhi (moving from Bangalore) for about two months already.
“The entire team at Zomato is very eager to work with Mohit and the team, and delight our users more than we have ever been able to before. We are also excited to work towards generating meaningful employment at scale using our logistics platform. At Zomato and Runnr, the delivery boy is going to get the status of “most important employee” and is going to be treated like one,” Goyal added.
Goyal told that Runnr is already efficiently fulfilling 300,000 orders a month – which is just a tad less than 10% of our food ordering volumes. Mohit will remain the Founder and CEO of Runnr and will continue developing his vision along with the rest of the founding team – Arpit, Mukunda, Gnanesh, Vatsal, and Aravind. (Image- Zomato)
Related read- Zomato to Become a Unicorn Soon; Fundraising Talks With Alibaba & Alipay
