Bangalore: Zomato, the popular restaurant search service, has announced a fresh round of funding of $37 million from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge. This takes Zomato’s total funding to over $53 million; Zomato had earlier raised $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 U.K. 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.
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 access all this information for free on Zomato’s website available at www.zomato.com or download Zomato’s beautifully designed mobile apps for iOS, Android or Windows.
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. This financing will help us develop a 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.”
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