Restaurant discovery & reviews venture Zomato expands to Chile

Gurgaon-based Zomato Media Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates restaurant, event listing & review site Zomato.com, has expanded its operations to Santiago in Chile to take its total city count to 13 across the globe. With this expansion, customers in Chile will get information on 7,000 restaurants on its city specific site.

According to the firm, Chileans can browse through restaurant information in Spanish and English, read & write restaurant reviews, and also build a personal network of trusted foodies. Zomato has also announced that it has earmarked $2 million for further expansion in the country.

"With its rich dining culture and high internet and smartphone penetration, Chile is a very promising market for us," said Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato.

"We already have a sizeable team in place in Santiago, and are in the process of growing it further. There are plans to expand into other markets in the continent as well," he added.

Zomato has been expanding aggressively across markets over the last year. Apart from India, the firm currently has operations in countries like South Africa, Philippines, the UAE, Indonesia, the UK, New Zealand, Portugal, Brazil, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Qatar, among others.

The startup was founded in 2008 by IIT Delhi alumni and ex-Bain employees Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. The firm had launched its services in Auckland and Wellington in July last year, and extended its services to Hamilton in December the same year.

An online and mobile restaurant discovery service, Zomato provides information such as menus, directions, contact details, pictures and user reviews for over 232,900 restaurants. The services are available on the web, and on mobile for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry platforms. Zomato claims that it is currently seeing over 20 million monthly visits globally across its web and mobile platforms.

The company has raised $53.5 million in funding to date, the most recent one being $37 million that it had raised from Sequoia Capital and existing investor Info Edge, which runs a slew of consumer internet portals, including Naukri.com. According to Techcircle.in estimates, Sequoia Capital picked around 17.2 per cent stake as part of the latest investment, giving Zomato a post-money valuation of around Rs 1,000 crore or around $158 million.

For the full year ended March 31, 2014, Zomato reported around 2.6x growth in its operating revenues at Rs 30.6 crore compared with Rs 11.38 crore a year ago. The operating EBITDA loss also widened to Rs 41.28 crore from Rs 10.03 crore last year.

Zomato had recently acquired New Zealand-based Menu Mania Ltd, the company behind the restaurant discovery and reviews site MenuMania.co.nz, for an undisclosed amount.