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Zomato acquires restaurant discovery sites Lunchtime and Obedovat for $3.25M

By Sainul K Abudheen

  • 22 Aug 2014

Gurgaon-based Zomato Media Pvt Ltd, owner of the restaurant, event listing & review site Zomato.com, has acquired online restaurant search service providers Czech Republic-based Lunchtime.cz and Slovakia-based Obedovat.sk for a total of $3.25 million. Post the acquisitions, Both Lunchtime and Obedovat teams will work closely with the Zomato team.

“Both Lunchtime and Obedovat have strong business models that cater to the local market needs of discovery of lunch menus. Together, we will be able to build the largest resource of restaurant information in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” said Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato.

“We are looking to infuse a further $2.5 million into our operations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia over the next couple of years,” he added.

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Launched in 2008, Lunchtime.cz offers overview of restaurants in various cities in Czech Republic, in addition to enabling users to book food online. The firm claims to have partnered with more than 3,000 restaurants in the country. Owned by Lunchtime.cz Ltd, its services are also available on iOS, Android and Windows platforms.

“We'll be able to combine our local expertise and focused product offering around lunch menus, with the technology and rich content platform that Zomato brings to the table. The combined product will enhance the user experience by providing them with fresh, more in-depth restaurant information along with lunch menus,” said Igor Treslin, founder and CEO of Lunchtime.

Founded in 2004 and run by Creative Web Group, Obedovat is an online restaurant guide that currently operates several other food portals. The company claims to have partnered with more than 2,100 restaurants in Slovakia.

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“The Lunchtime and Obedovat founding teams have spent a significant amount of time getting to know the founding team at Zomato, and are happy to see their strong focus on building a social restaurant discovery product. We respect their passion, and look forward to the Lunchtime and Obedovat teams becoming a part of Zomato,” said Zdenko Hoschek, CEO of Obedovat.

Zomato was founded in 2008 by IIT Delhi alumni and ex-Bain employees Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. The firm had launched its services in Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand in July last year, and extended its services to Hamilton in Canada in December the same year.

An online and mobile restaurant discovery service, Zomato provides information such as menus, directions, contact details, pictures and user reviews for over 232,900 restaurants. The firm has operations in 13 cities across the globe.

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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 20 million monthly visits globally across its web and mobile platforms.

The company has raised $53.5 million in funding to date, the most recent one being $37 million that it had raised from Sequoia Capital and existing investor Info Edge, which runs a slew of consumer internet portals, including Naukri.com. According to Techcircle.in estimates, Sequoia Capital 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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Early last month, Zomato acquired New Zealand-based Menu Mania Ltd, the company behind the restaurant discovery and reviews site, for an undisclosed amount.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)

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