Zomato Acquires Payments Platform MaplePOS, To Launch Zomato Base

Zomato’s acquisition spree continues – They have acquired Payments platform MaplePOS, which will now be the backbone of their soon to be launched Zomato Base, a customizable cloud based Point of Sale (POS) system specifically targeted at restaurant businesses. Post-acquisition, MaplePOS ceases to exist and will become integral part of Zomato’s new offering.

This is Zomato’s 8th acquisition in last 9 months and first acquisition outside of their Restaurant search vertical. Prior to this they have acquired MenuMania in New Zealand, Lunchtime in Czech Republic, Obedovat in Slovakia, and Gastronauci in Poland, Cibando in Italy, Mekanist in Turkey and their biggest acquisition of UrbanSpoon in the US.

Zomato recently raised a $50 million round from their early strategic investor Info Edge with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital. Post this round of funding, Zomato has become yet another Indian startup that is valued at over $1 Billion.

What is Zomato Base?

Zomato Base is essentially a Android-based point of sale platform geared towards restaurant businesses. It goes beyond just being Point of sale, but also offers features like Menu management that will allow participating restaurants to setup and change restaurants menu and prices anytime. Restaurants can keep a track of their inventory to know when to place orders for more. Other features include recipe management, CRM, real time analytics, electronic receipts, support for offline transactions and more. Beyond this, Zomato website also says they will have a “Stealth feature”, that’ll change the way restaurants do business (we are not too sure what this is…)

Zomato Base is envisaged to be platform that will allow Zomato to become end-to-end tech for restaurant businesses. As per the website, Zomato Base will be launching sometime later this year.

Zomato’s Founder and CEO said, “Zomato is the only food-tech company in the world which is building products for consumers as well as restaurant owners, There is a lot that can be done if we are able to build a technology platform that connects consumers to restaurants and vice versa, and we believe that a world-class cloud-based POS system is the first step towards building that platform. MaplePOS is a great point-of-sale product, and we are excited about the prospect of working with the MaplePOS team to build this further.”

MapleGraph, the company that developed MaplePOS was founded in 2011 by Arun Tangri, Varun Tangri, and Abhishek Rohilla. Arun Tangri, Co-Founder and CEO, MapleGraph, said: “We are excited to partner with Zomato to realise our dream of building the best and most widely adopted restaurant point of sale system in the world. Technology has seen very little penetration in the restaurant industry, and we are excited to be driving this change at large scale.”

From what we can say, Zomato is on it’s way to become a global leader in Food-Tech space (if they are not already). The acquisition of MaplePOS definitely in the right direction!