Food & Restaurant reviews are synonymous with Zomato in India and there are no competitors that offers so much coverage with such minimalistic user experience. Zomato got into food delivery last year which increased its monetization potential, while still offering discounts for few deliveries.
Today, Deepinder Goyal led startup has announced that Zomato has turned profitable in India and five other regions. The other countries are Philippines, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Qatar. Founded in 2008, it comes as a great news that one of the biggest India-born startups has started making profits in the country, something which most others, including the likes of Flipkart and Snapdeal, can’t yet boast about.
Pankaj Chaddah, Co-Founder of Zomato, said in an interview, “We can now channelize the profits to grow faster and compete harder in countries where we see significant competition. It’s a great thing that we don’t fully depend on external funds to fuel all the experiments and initiatives that we have undertaken in India and elsewhere.” Zomato’s profits could mainly come from online deliveries and advertisements on its website and app.
Zomato Funding
The news comes from the fact that Zomato is seeking another round of funding of $200 Million in April this year and would like to shed some good light on its working model. In the past, Zomato has been funded by Temasek Holdings, Sequoia Capital, Vy Capital and Info Edge.
With operations in nearly 17 countries all around the world, it makes sense to showcase their best until the next funding appears. Alibaba was interested in funding Flipkart and Zomato, it will be interesting to see if they go ahead with both or just one of them.
The dark side of Zomato which not many knew was the time Zomato fired about 300 employees last year. I’m not saying it is wrong to fire employees during difficult times, but to boost profits and show greater revenues, this is not a very efficient trick.
Nevertheless, the workforce has been reduced in areas which were gloating for absolutely no reason and required immediate attention.
Now that our favourite restaurant-search and food-delivery application is making profits, it would be interesting to see how competitors like TinyOwl, Foodpanda and Faasos among others react to it. The food-tech market is becoming more and more competitive everyday – Let’s see the volume of funds Zomato gets this year and how they innovate in this space.
[…] it took a lot of time, but Zomato turned profitable this year and has been on an expansion-spree ever since. There were talks to launching a cloud-based point of […]