Zomato Acquires Urbanspoon for $53M. Enters US, Canada & Australia

Zomato has made it’s biggest acquisition yet – They have acquired US based Urbanspoon. It is their sixth acquisition in last six months and also quite surprising given the price they have paid for it. While the press release sent to us states undisclosed amount and all-cash deal, the update posted by Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder states, “While we’ve been able to bring some great contemporaries into the fold over the past few months, this one is different. For one, we spent most of our last round of funding on this acquisition – but we’ve always believed that the edge of our comfort zone is where the magic happens.” Zomato had raised $60 million funding in their last round just 2 months back!

This update points that the acquisition is in the region of $60 million $52.5 Million or roughly 327 crore rupees (figure that Zomato has mentioned on BSE Filing). Here is how the combined Zomato-Urbanspoon entity will look like.

For Zomato, this is a big jump – Urbanspoon is bigger than Zomato in every sense, be it number of visits, app downloads or even restaurant listings. Urbanspoon gets roughly 45 million visits a month compared to Zomato’s 35 million. On mobile app downloads front, Zomato has 5+ million app downloads compared to over 25 million of Urbanspoon. In terms of number of restaurants Urbanspoon has more than double of Zomato’s 300k!

And yet, Zomato has taken a big leap by acquiring Urbanspoon. They are now suddenly in the big league among global players, competing with market leader Yelp!

With Urbanspoon’s acquisition, Zomato establishes it’s presence in Australia and Canada. They are already dominant in United Kingdom and New Zealand. Not to mention India!

Deepinder Goyal, also said on acquisition, “Our US entry has been in the cards for a while now, and we’re delighted to be doing so by welcoming Urbanspoon into Zomato. They have a strong presence in the US and the UK, and they also dominate restaurant search in Australia and Canada. Urbanspoon has a huge following, and is home to legions of people who are as passionate about food as we are. We will soon be integrating the two products to bring the best of both products to our users in the United States as well as the rest of the world.”

Zomato is now present in 22 countries across the world. Its restaurant coverage will increase from more than 1 million restaurants across the globe. Zomato’s traffic will more than double from about 35 million visits per months to more than 80 million visits per month, probably making it the largest restaurant search company in the world.

It is quite amazing to see how Zomato has grown inorganically over past 6 months – They are now present in every major market and have achieved it at a frantic pace!  They acquired popular Italian search service Cibando in month of November. Prior to that, within a gap of 4 months they had acquired MenuMania in New Zealand, Lunchtime in Czech Republic, Obedovat in Slovakia, and Gastronauci in Poland.

In the last funding round, Zomato was valued at roughly $660 million, however with acquisition of UrbanSpoon, their valuations would surely soar and are now probably yet another Billion Dollar Startup from India!