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Info Edge Bites Into Restaurant Review Site Foodiebay

By Pallavi S

  • 25 Aug 2010

Info Edge (India) has expanded the bouquet of sectors it is catering to through online consumer service portals. The company, that is behind websites such as naukri.com, jeevansathi.com and 99acres.com, now plans to invest Rs 4.7 crore in a two-year-old startup DC Foodiebay Online Services Pvt Ltd that operates the popular restuarants menu and review website foodiebay.com.

The company did not disclose the stake purchased through the transaction but it is likely to be significant for the startup formed by a couple of IIT alumnus: Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah.

Goyal holds an Integrated Masters in Mathematics and Computing from IIT Delhi and has previously worked for four years with consultancy firm Bain and Company in India. He looks after overall strategy including content acquisition, legal issues, competitor benchmarking, marketing strategy, growth and sustainability. Chaddah is a 2007 IIT Delhi grad and has also worked with Bain and Company for over two years. He sells advertisement space to restaurant owners and is the main person behind Foodiebay's marketing programme.

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The investment comes after Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani last month transitioned from the post of CEO to Executive Vice Chairman to focus primarily on strategic matters, investments and acquisitions.

Foodiebay has various elements in its website including menu of most food outlets starting from a small corner dhaba to top notch restuarants in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Kolkata. With over 24,000 followers on facebook itself, the website appears to have become popular too.

The website is updated every four months and as of early this year had a team of just about a dozen people. The company’s founders had said in a media interview in April this year that they were looking for funds and had approached some venture capitalists for the money.

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Foodiebay apparently earns majority of its revenue comes from advertising and revenue-sharing with restaurants. The restaurants, incidentally, are not charged for listing their menus on foodiebay even as the website has plans to eventually generate some revenues from that too.

Review websites are not new in India. The early mover in the game is Burrp.com, which was acquired by Infomedia18, part of Network18 group, besides others like HungryZone in Bangalore and TimesCity.com from the Times of India stable. 

Foodiebay has a strong positioning in the food category and the deal will provide a diversification for Info Edge in the segment.

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Whether it has managed to acquire a majority stake will become clear soon as then the company will include revenues of Foodiebay in its consolidated financial accounts but if it has just picked a large minority stake then the deal values Foodiebay at around Rs 10 crore or even more.

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