Introduction and about the founders- bhavana ZOMATO is a restaurant and lifestyle portal in India. It has two sections - Restaurant Guide and Events.
The Restaurant Guide section currently serves Ten major cities in India – Mumbai – Mumbai,, Delhi NCR , Kolkata,, Bangalore Kolkata Bangalore,, Pune Pune,, Chennai Chennai,, Hyderabad Hyderabad,, Ahmedabad Ahmedabad,, Jaipur Jaipur & & Chandigarh Chandigarh.. The website [1] currently lists over 18,000 restaurants and featured menus for restaurants listed on the website. As per recent press reports, Zomato claims that it gets more than a million[2] customers on its website. The Events section on Zomato was introduced in September 2011[1]. This coincided with Zomato announcement of raising their second round of funding of $3M from Info Edge India (P) Ltd[3]. Zomato.com was previously known as Foodiebay.com. The brand name was changed due to a possible move outside of the food vertical and also to avoid a future conflict with eBay eBay,, because [4] the earlier brand name Foodiebay contained ‘ebay’ in it. it. Foodiebay was started by Deepinder Goyal, Goyal,[5] a graduate from IIT Delhi. The journey to the present-day Zomato started as a small exercise to help his colleagues negotiate huge stacks of menu cards with ease.[5] It was in 2008 when he was working with Bain and Company, Company, a management consulting firm, when he put pu t all menu cards in his office on the internet.[5] Deepinder’s juniors from college, Pankaj Chaddah and Gunjan Patidar (who are now Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer respectively), joined him in building the database. Zomato officially started in July 2008 with a list of 1,200 restaurants in the Delhi NCR region. This database expanded to 2,000 restaurants by end 2008. Within the next six months, Kolkata[6] and Mumbai[7] regions were included on the website. In 2010, the website was named amongst the top 25 most promising internet companies in India by the SmartTechie Magazine. Mag azine.[8] By June 2010, the website broke even and had expanded its reach to Bangalore and Pune. That is when Infoedge, the parent company of the Naukri.com the Naukri.com group, invested Rs 4.7 Crores ($1M)[9] in the business. Recently, Zomato has also launched its Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad section and the first local search iPhone iPhone,, Android and BlackBerry application in India. India.[1
harikrishnan Infoedge to invest 4.7 CR in FOODIEBAY Foodiebay lists menus, prices and contact details of restaurants and also offers discount coupons to dinners, Infoedge said in a statement. Foodiebay is currently present in five cities of the country and plans to use this investment for product development, marketing and to further increase their geographic footprint. "The space in which they are operating, holds tremendous potential as a vastly scalable business. With disposable incomes on the rise, and options of many cuisines' consumers are increasingly looking at exploring new food options and Foodiebay will provide them a wide range of options," Info Edge Senior VP Corporate Development Vivek Khare said. Info Edge owns and manages - Naukri.Com, Jeevansathi.Com, 99acres.Com, Shiksha.Com apart from Quadrangle ¿ an offline executive search firm and Naukri Gulf. Info Edge also owns Brijj.Com, a professional networking site and Allcheckdeals.Com, a real estate brokerage firm. "We plan to use these funds to scale our operations and to develop the next generation of web, mobile and social products that will excite our users and also provide unique opportunities to the local business owners," Foodiebay Co-Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said
akash Foodiebay Rebrands to Zomato Foodiebay recently raised Rs. 4.7 Crores from InfoEdge and the NCR based startup has rebranded itself to Zomato.com. The rebranding decision comes in the wake of company moving beyond the ‘food’ category.
“We plan to expand not only to more cities in India but to countries as well. Starting next year we plan to go international in our offerings and it’s not just that, we want to offer you more than just restaurant directory listings. As a product, we want to evolve into a recommendation engine that suggests you the best places to order home delivery from or to dine-out at. We are also planning to launch a nightlife section very soon. Overall, the question we want to answer for you in the longer term is – “Where should I go today”? We saw that if we wanted to touch broader horizons then the name “Foodiebay” wasn’t going to be the best option since it might restrict our perception as just a food website. And right now was the time to reflect deeply and think about what we should be christened as especially since we are going to invest heavily in marketing the brand. Another thought that was at the back of our minds was to prevent any overstepping of ebay when we start accepting online payments. Given these goals, we put our heads to the grindstone and thought a lot about it the last 2 weeks. “
shruthi Info Edge To Invest $3M More In Zomato Zomato Investment
This is Info Edge’s second round of investment in Zomato. In August 2010, it had invested Rs 4.7 crore ($1 million) in what was Zomato’s first round of funding. The capital was used to fund the start-up’s product development, sales and marketing efforts. The fresh round of funding will be used to ramp up its employee base and open more offices. However, the promoters continue to hold a majority share in the company. “Zomato.com is one of India’s fastest-growing consumer Internet portals. The satisfaction levels on both sides of the value chain (consumer and merchant) are very high – a testimony to the great product made for the consumers and the value seen by the merchants. We see immense potential in their current model, in their future plans and in the capability of the team to execute it well,” said Sanjeev Bhikhchandani, founder and executive vice-chairman of Info Edge. How Zomato Has Scaled Up
Over the past year, the company has grown its reach from 7,000 restaurants in five cities to 18,000 eateries across 10 cities – Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Chandigarh. Compared to last year, Zomato has seen a rise in traffic from 1.5 lakh to over 10 lakh monthly visitors, of which over one lakh are registered users. In the first quarter of the year, it launched mobile apps and recently introduced an events sub-site Zomato.com/Events. Opening New Offices, Hiring Sales Force
From a team of 22 last year, the company has now scaled up to 85 people and it will reach 300 by September this year. By March 2012, it expects to have 500 people on board, according to Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato.com. Zomato is now ramping up in a hurry, adding five employees per week. Most of the new hires are primarily in sales as the company expands its operations to more cities. It has offices in Gurgaon, Bangalore and Mumbai, and has recently set up operations in Pune and Hyderabad. The company is also opening offices in Chandigarh, Jaipur, Kolkata, Chennai, Goa, Kochi, Surat and Indore. This reflects a renewed focus on tier II cities and reaching out to more towns, instead of its earlier strategy of pursuing international markets. Explaining the shift in strategy, Goyal said, “We had to make a choice of either going international or plunging into events in the local market. We decided to capture events first and continue to grow locally. We will then take the step of launching internationally.”
New Focus Areas: Events, Ticketing
According to Goyal, Zomato is now aggressively focusing on its events section. Initially launched to target Delhi, Mumbai and Pune, the events section will reach out to four more cities by end of this month. The start-up is also working on adding online booking features to its site. “We are planning to make a discovery and ticketing platform for events and will also be working with partners to run table reservations and online orders,” he added.
abraham Updated: Zomato Adds An Events Section; Time To Get Into Online Bookings? Update: Zomato Founder Deepinder Goyal informs that the company is working on an ecommerce section, which it intends to roll out before the end of this year.
Online restaurant guide, Zomato has introduced an Events section for the Delhi/NCR region. For starters it claims to list over 250 upcoming events under various categories such as arts & literature, music & dance, food & drink, entertainment, nightlife, talks & workshops, fashion and others. Users can discover events happening in the city by date, category and keywords, and view event details, location & timings, pictures and also view similar events and restaurants near by, along with the event listing. The Events home page lists recommended events, popular events and the week’s events agenda, which lists out selected events for each day of the week. It intends to extend the events section to Mumbai and Bangalore, shortly.
The company says that the move is inline with its rebranding strategy, repositioning Zomato as a lifestyle brand from being a food-focussed brand, Foodiebay. Our Take
By introducing an events section, Zomato is now competing with the likes of BuzzInTown and Burrp. While these sites also allow users to add events, as well as buy events tickets online, Zomato is a bit cautious in its approach and curates events on its own, even though it does accept requests to feature events, via e-mail. It does not have an e-commerce engine integrated with the site to offer tickets or restaurant bookings. We feel that Zomato has one of the best user interfaces, compared to other sites that have similar offerings. Along with the website, it also offers native apps for all major smartphone platforms and a mobile web version. Sites like JustEat and Bookurtable are already offering restaurant bookings and online orders. It’s a pity that Zomato – which claims to have listings for over 18,000 restaurants across 10 Indian cities and more than 10 Lakh monthly users - is hesitant to introduce e-commerce. However, we do like the fact that Zomato has been really vocal when it comes to talking about things like why it does not want to introduce an online food delivery service or why it’s going slow on restaurant group deals, although it has not dismissed them entirely and has said that “it will wait until it finds a sourcing and distribution model which will keep the unit economics low and provide long term sustainable value to customers as well as businesses.” If nothing else, it should consider a tie-up with either JustEat or Bookurtable to close that loop for customers. Zomato.com forays into online ticketing for events
New Delhi, Dec. 20: Online food and lifestyle guide Zomato.com has forayed into online ticketing for its ‘events' section starting with New Year's Eve parties for restaurants and hotels in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. The recently launched Zomato.com events section, which lists over 500 upcoming events across these four cities, is going live with over 1.75 lakh tickets for New Year's Eve parties, translating to over Rs 40 crore of ticket inventory online, according to a company statement. Mr Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato.com said, “The site caters to over 2 million visitors every month through its restaurant guide and it plans to cross-sell tickets to its own audience to keep customer acquisition costs low. Since this is the first time Zomato.com has forayed into ticketing, Zomato has decided not to levy a convenience charge to its customers.” Tickets will be available for more than 30 venues in each of the four cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune.
