India’s rapidly growing restaurant service start-up Zomato has announced a new round of funding of USD 37 million from Sequoia Capital and its existing investor Info Edge. With this fresh round of funding, the company has now raised a total of USD 53 million from its investors.
InfoEdge, which own the online job portal Naukri.com, continues to remain the largest shareholder in Zomato with over 50% stake. With the fresh round of funding, the company’s founders shareholding has reduced and own a very little stake in it as a part of it is now in favor of Sequoia Capital.
Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said: "This is an exciting phase for us. We believe that we can improve 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."
The company intends to use its funds for expanding its service internationally to new countries. Currently, the company announced that its services has been added to three new countries – Brazil (Sao Paulo), Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara), and Indonesia (Jakarta). The site will be made available in local languages - Portuguese, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesia, respectively. Additionally, the company has also rolled out its service in the U.K.’s Glasgow and Edinburgh, bringing to a total of five supported cities in the U.K
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Info Edge said: "Zomato is one of the finest consumer Internet businesses to come out of India."
Zomato features over 160,000 restaurants in 35 cities spanning 11 countries. It plans to expand to 22 more countries across Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia and the Americas in the next two years. It will be interesting to see how Zomato plans to target new countries and expand its service.
Advertisements