Zomato Raises USD 37 Million

Zomato, the popular restaurant search service, which launched in New Zealand three months ago with its Auckland and Wellington sections, 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.

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 180,000 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.

Some facts about Zomato:

• Headquartered in New Delhi, and started 5 years ago, Zomato employs over 600 people across 35 cities in 11 countries.
• It currently has 14 people employed in the Auckland office.
• Available across web and mobile, Zomato provides in-depth information such as menus, directions, contact details, pictures, and user reviews, for over 5000 restaurants in Auckland and Wellington and over 180,000 restaurants globally.
• Zomato gets over 15 million visits across its web and mobile platforms every month.
• Traffic has grown by over 300% in the past year.
• More than half of Zomato’s traffic is seen on its mobile apps – 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.

Globally, the most valuable company in this space is Yelp with a market cap in excess of USD 4.5 billion.

Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato 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 globalizing 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 Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.