Zomato raises USD 37 million from Sequoia Capital & Info Edge to fund global expansion; launches in

Nov. 8, 2013 - PRLog -- 7th November 2013: Zomato, the popular restaurant search service, 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 (http://www.zomato.com) 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 160,000 restaurants across the 11 countries of its presence. Users can access all this information for free on Zomato’s website available atwww.zomato.com or download Zomato’s beautifully designed mobile apps (http://www.zomato.com/mobile) 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.

Zomato has a dominant traffic share in India and UAE with an estimated 70% traffic share in its space; it is also the largest player in most of its other markets of presence.

Available across web, mobile, and print, Zomato provides in-depth information such as menus, directions, contact details, pictures, and user reviews, for over 160,000 restaurants.

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.

Monetisation trends are robust with a 500% growth in monthly billings as compared to a year ago. The India and UAE operations have broken even at the EBITDA level.

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.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder of Info Edge said, “Zomato is one of the finest consumer Internet businesses to come out of India. It has a great team, a great brand, a super user experience, a dominant market share, excellent revenue scale-up with a known path to profit, and a global opportunity. We are excited to partner with them to build a world-class restaurant search engine.”

About Zomato

Zomato, founded in 2008, is a restaurant guide providing in-depth information for over 160,000 restaurants in 35 cities across 11 countries. Zomato's core content features include menus, photos and geocoded coordinates for restaurants. Other community features include reviews, ratings and the ability to follow other users' recommendations on Zomato. Apart from the website and apps, Zomato is also available in print in select cities in India, with versions for other cities on the way.

Zomato was started by IIT Delhi alumni in July 2008 for Delhi NCR and has expanded its services to 35 cities across India, UK, UAE, South Africa, New Zealand, the Philippines, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Qatar.

For more information, please visit: www.zomato.com/press

About Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital in India currently manages funds capitalized at close to USD 1.4 billion and invests across venture, growth, and late stage opportunities. It takes a long-term view on investments and plays the role of an active, value-added partner to entrepreneurs, business families and management teams. Over the past 5 years, Sequoia Capital has invested in more than 50 companies in India including Capillary Technologies, Druva Software, Justdial, Micromax, Mu Sigma, Pine Labs, Prizm Payments, Quick Heal and Vasan Health Care. Sequoia Capital operates out of offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, and New Delhi.

Globally, Sequoia Capital has an unparalleled track record of partnering with entrepreneurs to create global market leaders. Sequoia Capital has been an early investor in companies such as Google, Cisco, Yahoo, YouTube, Oracle, Apple, Zappos, Dropbox, and LinkedIn. Sequoia Capital maintains dedicated teams in USA, China, India and Israel.

For more information, please visit: www.sequoiacap.com

About Info Edge (India) Ltd.

Info Edge (India) Limited  is the leading internet company in India. Info Edge is well known for its internet businesses - Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, and Shiksha.com. Info Edge, over the last 4 years, has ventured into newer areas by investing in promising startups in the Indian internet space. To date, including this investment in Zomato, it has invested an aggregate of over USD 55 million in nine startups. With its headquarters in Delhi NCR, Info Edge employs over 2500 people and operates through 59 offices in 35 cities in India and overseas offices in Dubai, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.

Contact:
Naina Sahni (VP Public Relations, Zomato)
naina@zomato.com, +91 8826 362 037