Zomato, Gurgaon-based online restaurant guide, has made its fourth acquisition: Poland’s restaurant search service Gastronauci. Industry sources have estimated the buy at a little less than $2 million (₹12 crore).
This fourth buy in three months clearly signals Zomato’s intent to become a global player.
Zomato acquired New Zealand-based restaurant search service MenuMania in July, and Czech Republic’s Lunchtime.cz and Slovakia’s Obedovat.sk in August. While it bagged MenuMania for just ₹5 crore, it snapped up Lunchtime.cz and Obedoyat.sk together for around ₹19 crore.
Market experts maintain that Zomato’s expansion strategy is mostly in non-English speaking markets, where it would be otherwise difficult to make inroads.
“It would be difficult for the company to make inroads in developed markets such as the UK or the US, where it has to face giants like San Francisco-based Yelp. Such multiple acquisitions will not only help the company achieve scale, but also gain investor confidence as it has raised a lot of money without having a strong revenue model yet,” said a top official at one of the leading food ordering sites in India.
Zomato earns revenues from advertisements that restaurants post on its site. It provides information on over 2,60,000 restaurants across 16 countries, and serves over 25 million monthly visitors globally.
Raising funds Since its inception in 2008 by IIT-Delhi alumni and ex-Bain employees Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, Zomato has raised around $53.8 million (₹322 crore) in five rounds from Sequoia and Info Edge.
Last November, the company raised $37 million (₹222 crore) in series D.
On the recent acquisition, Deepinder Goyal, founder CEO, said in a statement, “Both Zomato and Gastronauci are committed towards building the best platform possible to connect users and the restaurant industry.
“We are excited to work on building an integrated product combining our technology with Gastronauci’s exhaustive reach in Poland.”
He further added that post the acquisition, the team at Gastronauci would be working closely with the Zomato team.