Zomato Brings Restaurants Online And Looks Toward Payments

Zomato has secured another major round of funding as the restaurant search app plans its next moves into food delivery, payments and reservations.

Zomato‘s latest funding round brings its total VC funding to $220 million. Its latest funding round comes from Temasek, along with Vy Capital, TechCrunch reported. Zomato also raised $50 million last spring. This new funding round will help expand the mission of the company that works with 1.4 million restaurants in 22 countries. And according to Zomato, it brings in more than 90 million visits per month.

“We will use this round to make investments in our new businesses, such as online ordering, table reservations, point of sales and our newly launched Whitelabel Platform. With this round and with some of our markets turning profitable recently, Zomato is well capitalized for at least two years. We are also stoked to have Temasek partner with us and are looking forward to building one of the largest food tech companies in the world,” CEO and Cofounder Deepinder Goyal said in a statement.

And just yesterday (Sept. 7), Zomato announced that it has released its new Whitelabel Platform that helps restaurants get their businesses online. This is likely indicating that Zomato also wants to expand its ambitions to online delivery. The key feature on the platform is to help restaurants roll out custom-branded native mobile apps to connect better with consumers.

“While speaking with a lot of restaurant owners, we realized that most of them do not have an app or digital presence, and they want to harness the power and distribution of the Internet and mobile to grow their business. And that there is no one single service provider for restaurants which can give them the entire suite of technologies required to run an Internet presence closely integrated with the operations of their business,” Ashish Goel, chief of product and design for Zomato, said in a news release.

“We see this as an opportunity to have a larger impact on the food tech ecosystem, as well as create a larger overlap between tech and food.”

Zomato said this will start by adding online ordering offerings in Australia and South Africa later this month, but its ambitions don’t stop there. Payments will also be added to the platform soon. Table ordering is yet another feature the company is looking to launch in Australia and U.K. as Zomato looks to expand globally.

“We are excited about the pace of innovation at Zomato. The bigger picture is increasingly becoming clearer to us, and we are hoping that in a few months, we will be able to solve a large part of the pain points that users, as well as business, face in the industry,” Pankaj Chaddah, cofounder of Zomato, said.



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