Zomato, India’s youngest MNC, turns tech hub for global eateries
GURGAON: Just across the fancy Gold Souk in the suburban glitter of Gurgaon, in an expansive floor of a five-storeyed office building, dozens of youngsters sit around huge tables with laptops. There are no cubicles or workstations.
It is a Saturday, but there is a laid-back buzz. We are inside the headquarters of Zomato, and this is arguably India’s youngest multinational – and still a startup. Born only in 2008, the online restaurant guide now has 43 offices worldwide, spread across 22 countries, with staff from 65 nationalities. Though it climbed to fame as a place where foodies share opinions , it now going beyond listings that fetch ad revenues.
Zomato, which has so far raised $163 million from venture capitalists , is turning into a supplier of point-of-sale payment machines and software-driven transaction services that would automate workflows for eateries worldwide.
Imagine a waiter tapping a menu card on a tablet that beeps an order into the front office machine that processes the order, deducts a payment against a credit card or prints out a bill.
“It is a custom hardware. It will take another six months to start,” says Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s 32-year-old co-founder and CEO an IIT-Delhi computer science graduate.
The machine would be designed by Indian engineers, but made in China. Last April, Zomato acquired MapleGraph, a Delhi-based cloud (Internet) pointof-sale product for restaurants, and renamed it Zomato Base.
“There are no boundaries anymore,” says smiling, chubby-faced Goyal, who has come a long way from being the younger child of schoolteachers in the small Punjab town of Muktsar. After burning its fingers in 2011 in an events business, Zomato sent some senior executives including co-founder Pankaj Chaddah to Dubai to test the market. It struck gold, breaking even in six months.
“That gave us the confidence. Then we went crazy and we are now in 22 countries,” says Goyal.. “We have eight more countries lined up in the next six months.” Technolo g y industry site TechCrunch puts Zomato’s valuation at $ 1billion (`6,300 crore).
Global growth zoomed like a dream last year when Goyal wanted to expand in New Zealand, where boutique firm MenuMania ran restaurant listings.
“I called the founder and said I want to buy you. He agreed and asked for the price. I had no logic. I said one million dollars. He said yes.
That gave me an idea that there must be a lot of boutiques across the world,” recalls Goyal.