Zomato enters Italy with its fifth acquisition this year

The News Minute | December 19, 2014 | 12.27 pm ISTGurgaon based Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd is on an expansion spree with its recent acquisition of Cibando, one of Italy’s largest restaurant search services, according to a report on Livemint.The restaurant aggregator which provides detailed restaurant information such as menus, contact details, pictures, geo-coded maps and user reviews of over 310,000 restaurants raised $60 million in November and has invested $6 million in Italy over the next two years to grow business and team, said the report.The company has chosen to not disclose the value of the deal but has confirmed its expansion plans with its other acquisitions like MenuMania from New Zealand, Lunchtime in Czech Republic, Obedovat in Slovakia and Gastronauci in Poland this year. Cibando will be their fifth buy making them present in 20 countries.The report goes on to say that the company further aims at making their presence felt in 15 more countries by 2015 but has stayed away from markets in the US as it is dominated by Yelp, GrubHub and OpenTable.Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder of Zomato was quoted in the report saying, “Our acquisition strategy is to either acquire a market leader or to make sure that the acquisition will help us be a market leader in a very short span,”With its acquisition in Italy, now Zomato will be competing with Yelp UK, Canada, New Zealand and Chile, might hit US markets in 2015, said the report Valued at $660 million, Zomato has raised $113 million from funding it received from Info Edge, Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, said the report.Currently being run with 900 people in 100 cities in 20 countries, Zomato gets 35 million visits per month across all platforms; with more than half the traffic generated from their mobile app users. Cibando is one of the largest restaurant search service provider with 7000 professionally generated reviews, 150,000 photographs taken by food photographers and about 82,000 listed restaurants.Zomato also plans to become the one-stop shop for everything from restaurant discovery to restaurants payments in the future and soon will be introducing payment option on their app version in some market, including Dubai, adds the report. Tweet