Popular reaurant search service Zomato has announced a fresh round of funding of US$37 million from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge. This takes Zomato’s total funding to over US$53 million. The company Zomato had earlier raised US$16.5 million from Info Edge over four rounds of funding.
Zomato 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.
The company 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 or download Zomato’s mobile apps for iOS, Android or Windows Phone.
Headquartered in New Delhi, and started five years ago, Zomato employs over 600 people across 35 cities in 11 countries. The company has plans to over the next two years expand to 22 more countries across Europe, South-East Asia, Australia and the Americas.
