Restaurant search service Zomato has raised $37 million (around Rs 220 crore) in the fifth round from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge. This takes Zomato’s total funding to over $53 million (Rs 318 crore). It had earlier raised investments from Info Edge in four rounds.
The New Delhi-headquartered company has also announced the launch of its services in three new countries — Brazil (Sao Paulo), Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara), and Indonesia (Jakarta) in local languages. Besides, it has expanded its services within the UK from three cities to five, with the inclusion of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Its founder Deepinder Goyal said, “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.” It is looking to expand to 22 more countries across Europe, South-East Asia, Australia and the Americas.
The company 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 and hence it updates menu cards every three months across over 160,000 restaurants in 11 countries that it is present in.
Zomato has a dominant traffic share in India and the UAE with an estimated 70 per cent traffic share in its space and is the largest player in most of its other markets of presence.
Sequoia’s Managing Director Mohit Bhatnagar said, “We have been championing the cause of Indian companies globalising 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.”
The company claims to receive over 15 million visits across its Web and mobile platform every month. It also claims that monthly billings are currently growing at 500 per cent and that the India and UAE operations have broken even. It currently employs 600 people.