Online restaurant guide, Zomato has today raised $37 million from Sequoia Capital and its existing investors, Info Edge and launched operations in Durban, South Africa.
The fresh round of funding of $37 million from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge takes Zomato’s total funding to over $53 million as it had earlier raised $16.5 million from Info Edge over four rounds of funding.
Speaking about the round, 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.”
Goyal added the financing will help Zomato be the 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,” Goyal added.
Apart from Durban, Zomato has also launched opeartions in Sao Paulo Brasil, Jarkata Indonesia and in Instanbul and Ankara, Turkey. Zomato has also expanded its services within UK from three cities to five, with the inclusion of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
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Pooja Khanna, CEO of Zomato South Africa said, “South Africa has been one of our best performing markets. The market has great potential with lots of restaurants and a growing internet and smartphone penetration. The response from Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria has been overwhelming and we expect the trend to continue with Durban.”
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 from over 160,000 restaurants.
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 assess the platform online or download its location-aware mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or Blackberry.
The New Delhi Headquartered firm was launched 5 years ago in India and employs over 600 people across 35 cities in 11 countries and gets over 15 million visits across its web and mobile platforms monthly.
