Zomato, the online restaurant search engine is expanding its business globally
Zomato, the online restaurant search engine is expanding its business globally

Zomato, the India-based restaurant search engine launche in 2008 has recently acquired two of its peers in Czech Republic and Slovakia (Lunchtime and Obedovat), has increased its presence to 15 countries. Presently, the company operates in UK, UAE, South Africa, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Qatar, and over 25 cities across India.

''We want to be the 'Google' of food. Our vision is to be the global platform when someone is looking for food locally," says Pankaj Chaddah, Co-Founder & COO, Zomato in an interaction with Business Standard.

Zomato today has a share of Rs 31-crore backed by Info Edge (owner of Naukri.com) and Sequoia Capital. The big markets for restaurants are in the US, Germany, Japan, Russia, Australia and the UK. The space is dominated by local-business search giant Yelp, which is present in 28 such markets. There are others like JustEat (13 countries) and Open Table (20 countries) but they are focused on food-ordering and table-bookings, respectively and don't have a restaurant discovery like Zomato or Yelp.

Not only this focusing on deep market research, in the UK, people are used to table-bookings; so it tied up with Open Table, ResDiary, and Bookatable. ''We are the discovery layer and they are the transaction layer,'' says Chaddah.

 
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