Zomato, the restaurant search and discovery service, has closed a further $60 million in funding, giving the company a post-money valuation of $660 million. Investment has come from Vy Capital, and existing backers Info Edge and Sequoia Capital. It takes total funding to over $113 million.
Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato, said “From just restaurant discovery and menus, Zomato has now become a vast global community driven by social interactions. This is an exciting point in our journey, as we accelerate our way across the globe, and build a product that will continue to redefine the way people dine.”
Available on web and mobile, Zomato provides detailed restaurant information such as menus, contact details, pictures, geocoded maps, and user reviews, for ~300,000 restaurants. The company sees over 30 million visits across its web and mobile platforms every month and more than half of Zomato’s traffic is seen on its mobile apps. Zomato claims a 300% growth in revenue compared to last year.
“We will use the funding to go into hyper-drive on our key focus — driving leadership across more markets,” Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah said commenting on the latest funding round. “We will also use a large part of this round to go after some key strategic acquisitions which will help us strengthen our market share across various countries.”
In addition, he says there are a number of “innovative” products in the pipeline, while the new funding round will help speed up development and scale these new products faster. “Overall, this raise enables us to be much more aggressive with every initiative we take – it gives us more room to try harder and fail faster,” adds Chaddah.
Although India remains its strongest market, Zomato’s restaurant search and discovery service now spans over 100 cities in 18 counties, most recently adding a presence in Central and Eastern Europe by means of two local acquisitions. In late August, it gobbled up the Czech Republic’s Lunchtime.cz and Slovakia’s Obedovat.sk — the leading restaurant guides in their respective countries — for a combined $3.25 million.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder of Info Edge, said, “Our first investment in Zomato was made almost 4 years ago, and the team has shown phenomenal progress since then to build the Zomato that we know and use. The company is growing very fast, and we are proud to back them up to further grow the business – both inside and outside of India.”
