In the past few years, Zomato has become like a mecca for all food lovers. Such has become the case, that foodies in India call it as the 'Google for all food related search needs.' Well, if you think, the company is only turning heads in India, you're wrong.
According to the recent news doing round in the tech world, the food technology company has left its other food technology competitors far behind in the profitability race. The cheery on the cake is, that the online restaurant search, rating and food-ordering firm has not operationally broken even in India, but as well as five other international markets that include the UAE, Lebanon, Qatar in West Asia; and Indonesia and Philippines in Southeast Asia.
Further, the food tech company which has also been bestowed upon with the title of 'unicorn' for having a valuation of more than $1 billion has big plans for this year. Zomato is looking forward to raising as much as $200 million in April this year from its old as well as new sets of investors. According to sources, Baidu, China's web services giant, is expected to be leading the pack in Zomato's fresh funding round. If this does become true, this will be the China based company's first ever investment in India.
Launched 8 years ago in 2008, the food tech company has a total of around 2,600 employees currently across various offices. Zomato plans to up this number to 4,000 by the end of 2016.
Zomato and Baidu have been engulfed in investment talks for quite some time now. Most probably, the Chinese web giant will take part in the Zomato's fresh funding round taking place in April this year, taking the company's valuation to more than $1.5 billion. According to September 2015 figures, Zomato's valuation had increased to a little over $1 billion.
The food tech company, which recently made headlines for letting go around 300 employees, failing to meet its financial targets and shutting down regional centres, has an aim of achieving an operational profit in 2016. Zomato's competitors like Foodpanda and Swiggy are yet to break even in key markets.
According to Deepinder Goyal, founder & chief executive, Zomato, the company has been successful in doubling its revenue on a year-on-year basis in the past few years, and the same can be expected from them this year as well. The online restaurant discovery site is profitable in six of the 18 markets where they are the market front runners.
The company whose 22 per cent traffic and 35 per cent of the total revenue comes from India, has been successful in raising a whopping sum of $225 million from investors like Sequoia India, Vy Capital, Info Edge and Temasek.
In addition to being an online restaurant search and rating site, the site has recently started with online food ordering service and serves over 15,000 orders a day at an average ticket price of Rs 575.
Here's wishing Zomato all the very best for a successful run this year too.
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