Zomato Joins The Unicorn League With $1 Billion & A New Mobile App To Its Name

Online restaurant guide and food ordering firm Zomato has raised USD 60 million (over Rs 400 crore) in a fresh round of funding led by Singapore investment company Temasek along with participation from existing investor Vy Capital.

The company will use the investment to expand new business verticals, Zomato said in a statement.

Funds Usage

Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said: “We will use this round to make investments in our new businesses such as online ordering, table reservations, point of sales, and our newly launched Whitelabel platform.”

With this round, and with some of our markets turning profitable recently, Zomato is well capitalised for at least two years, he added.

This takes Zomato’s total funding to USD 225 million from four investors – Info Edge, Sequoia India, Vy Capital and now Temasek. The company has now become a part of the coveted Unicorn League.

“We are also stoked to have Temasek partner with us, and are looking forward to building one of the largest food-tech companies in the world,” Goyal said.

Founded in 2008, Zomato employs over 3000 people across 22 countries. Available on web and mobile, it provides restaurant information such as menus, contact details, pictures and user reviews for 1.4 million restaurants.

More On Whitelabel

Earlier today, Zomato announced the launch of its Whitelabel Platform. The key feature on the program is the ability for restaurants to launch custom-branded mobile apps to help them connect with and engage their customers.

Zomato Whitelabel Apps is a plug-and-play platform which will power a restaurant’s digital identity, enabling restaurants to spend more time focusing on their core business of food.

Ashish Goel, Chief of Product & Design, Zomato said, “While speaking with a lot of restaurant owners, we realised that most of them do not have an app or digital presence and they want to harness the power and distribution of the internet and mobile to grow their business. And that there is no one single service provider for restaurants which can give them the entire suite of technologies required to run an internet presence closely integrated with the operations of their business. We see this as an opportunity to have a larger impact on the food-tech ecosystem, as well as create a larger overlap between tech and food.”

The Whitelabel Services

The app offer features such as targeted push notifications, real-time information and menu management, and marketing tools to merchants. The app is based on a subscription model that bundles Zomato’s existing restaurant management app – Zomato For Business – into each subscription for free.

These Whitelabel apps incorporate all the additional services Zomato offers, such as Online Ordering, Table Reservations (NexTable acquisition), in-app Cashless payments, Loyalty programs and the upcoming Zomato Base (point of sales system).

Summerhouse Cafe in New Delhi, Miyabi Sushi in Dubai, and Shizuku Ramen in Melbourne are amongst the first 100 restaurants that have already signed up in the last week. The Zomato Whitelabel Platform will be available to restaurants in all 22 countries Zomato is present in currently.

In The Limelight

The food-tech segment has seen a lot of action over the last year and the investors have been very bullish on the segment.

While the dine-out and online ordering segments have seen a large chunk of this funding, internet-first restaurants have also seen their fair share of interest from investors.

Zomato believes that most of the internet-first restaurants primarily function on a ‘no/own kitchen + own delivery + on-demand’ model. The industry is seeing early signs of this concept germinating in certain urban clusters.

But a majority of the industry is dominated by the unorganized sector of asset-heavy restaurants, and the company believes that there is a huge untapped opportunity to get them online, build innovative services, and drive more value to customers.

Zomato’s introduction of Whitelabel Apps aims to capture this opportunity.