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Zomato acquires Polish restaurant discovery portal Gastronauci

By Sainul K Abudheen

  • 23 Sep 2014
Zomato acquires Polish restaurant discovery portal Gastronauci

Gurgaon-based Zomato Media Pvt Ltd, owner of the restaurant, event listing & review site Zomato.com, has acquired Poland-based restaurant search service Gastronauci for an undisclosed sum.

The transaction is expected to be completed by the beginning of next month. Post the acquisition, Zomato and Gastronauci will work on building and rolling out an integrated product in the coming months.

This is Zomato’s fourth acquisition in three months. In August, it snapped online restaurant search service providers Czech Republic-based Lunchtime.cz and Slovakia-based Obedovat.sk for a total of $3.25 million. A month earlier, it had bought New Zealand-based restaurant discovery service MenuMania.

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“Both Zomato and Gastronauci are committed towards building a platform to connect users and the restaurant industry. We will be building an integrated product combining our technology with Gastronauci’s reach in Poland,” said Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato.

According to Pramod Rao, director (international operations) at Zomato, the firm is planning to expand into multiple geographies in the immediate future, and expansion in Europe is one of its key focus areas.

Started in 2007, Gastronauci is a restaurant discovery and reviews site. The firm also offers mobile apps that enable users in Poland to look for places to dine out or order food from a database of over 26,000 restaurants across the country.

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“We have had great success in building a strong and engaging user-base for Gastronauci in Poland since launch. We look forward to working with Zomato and use their technology and product expertise to bring a new enhanced experience for both consumers and merchants,” said Ola Lazar, founder and CEO of Gastronauci.

Zomato was founded in 2008 by IIT Delhi alumni and ex-Bain employees Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. An online and mobile restaurant discovery service, Zomato provides information such as menus, directions, contact details, pictures and user reviews for over 260,000 restaurants. The firm is present in over 100 cities across 16 countries, including India, the UK, the Czech Republic, the UAE, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Qatar.

The services are available on the web, and on mobile for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry platforms. Zomato claims that it is currently seeing over 25 million monthly visits globally across its web and mobile platforms.

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Last week, the firm updated its iOS app with iOS 8 features to make the service more social (for more on this click here). Earlier this month, it appointed Rameet Arora as its chief marketing officer (CMO), replacing Alok Jain who had quit in July this year.

To date, Zomato has secured $53.5 million in funding, the latest one being $37 million that it had raised from Sequoia Capital and existing investor Info Edge India Ltd, owner of Naukri.com and 99acres.com. According to Techcircle.in estimates, Sequoia picked around 17.2 per cent stake as part of the latest investment, giving Zomato a post-money valuation of around Rs 1,000 crore or around $158 million.

For the full year ended March 31, 2014, Zomato reported around 2.6x growth in its operating revenues at Rs 30.6 crore compared with Rs 11.38 crore a year ago. The operating EBITDA loss also widened to Rs 41.28 crore from Rs 10.03 crore last year.

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(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)

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