Started with an aim to change the trend in food-tech industry and to excel in different areas other than restaurants and food, Foodiebay changed its name to Zomato in 2010. With over 19 million monthly users, they are offering services in 23 countries. In addition to enter in US market, Zomato acquired Urbanspoon for $55M. Started as restaurant discovery services, today they offer many services. Services include online ordering, booking cabs to reach yours favourite restaurant or clubs, cashless payment and table reservation.
Acquisitions by Zomato
The year 2014 and 2015 was very beneficial for Zomato, especially to make global presence. They acquired 5 companies in 2014 and 3 companies in 2015. They acquired the first company Menu Mania which was dominating in New Zealand. Together with Menu Mania, they brought the database of New Zealand restaurants together. Acquiring market leader was a great move by them, hence becoming the dominating player in New Zealand food marketplace. They also acquired Obedovat and Lunchtime, the online food guiding companies and Poland based Gastronauci.pl, restaurant news and reviewing company. Together with mobile application Cibando, Zomato strengthened the food marketplace in Italy. Total equity funding in 2014 was $60M from 3 investors namely Info Edge, Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Earlier in 2015, zomato acquires two companies. Two companies were Urbanspoon for $55M and Mekanist in order to enter Turkey, Canada, Australia and United States. Zomato led two funding rounds in April and September 2015 for $50M and $60M from 4 investors namely Info Edge, Vy Capital, Sequoia Capital and Temasek.
The major contribution of growth comes from young generation and corporate employees, usually more inclined toward comfort who are tech-savvy. Customer engagement plays a very crucial role for Zomato. They are highly interactive with customers through application and social media. Big and user-friendly food discovering platform spanning several regions and proper organized data of restaurants, nightlife, cafes, luxury dine-in made them largely popular among youngsters and foodies. Furthermore, they brought all types of restaurants under the same platform. In general, restaurants vary with type of services they offer and their targeted marketplace. They understood each and every type of restaurant and categorized effectively. They provide every detail such as cuisine, menu, budget, popular dishes etc. in more systematic and straight forward way.
Why Zomato is popular?
Zomato is quite popular among larger audience. They have 20.454M visitors on the website in a span of four months from January 2016 to April 2016. Likewise 68.12% of traffic on the website comes from 5 major marketplace namely India, United States, Australia, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. 33.27% of total traffic on website is contributed by India and 15.27% by United States making these two largest marketplace.
Zomato is more about the content and they work heavily to make content up to date and relevant. To keep the content real, zomato reads each and every review and pictures. They have the rights to delete the reviews and photos instantly, if your review or photos are not original. In addition to this, they gives option to update the previous review. Update is largely based on your subsequent visits to a particular place to keep the content real, fresh and updated.
Future aspects for Zomato
In conclusion, Zomato has a popularity advantage over others. They are currently market leader in 18 out of 23 countries, with 8.5 monthly users only in India. Trend of ordering food online is at its peak. They are offering online ordering service but in India with wide opportunity, they are not making much online orders as their rivals. They need a logistic team to pick food from restaurants and deliver to customers. They have more restaurants in their list compared to rivals. India is the biggest marketplace for Zomato and Indians are more inclined toward cash-on-delivery (COD) in comparison to online payments. They need to introduce COD options for all the restaurants, to excel swiftly.
There is a huge potential for Zomato in India as well in many markets. In order to grow more, they need to introduce more services and need not stick to be only restaurant discovering service provider. Zomato has potential to make much greater revenue and to serve in more regions.