Zomato has access to US, Australian markets now.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: New Delhi-based restaurant search provider Zomato has acquired its American rival Urbanspoon for $52 million, in one of the biggest overseas acquisitions ever made by an Indian startup.
The purchase comes after Zomato put a capstone on the past year by rapidly acquiring five new companies in as many months, four of which were based in Europe.
With its latest and most lavish corporate procurement, Zomato can enter the U.S., and Australian markets for the first time.
“Our U.S. entry has been in the cards for a while now,” said Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s founder and Chief Executive Officer. “[Urbanspoon has] a strong presence in the U.S. and the U.K., and they also dominate restaurant search in Australia and Canada.”
Goyal told Reuters in an interview: “It’s an all cash deal. We pretty much had to spend all our last round of funding on this and it’s sort of a big deal for us.”
According to Zomato, it now has a presence in 22 different countries and coverage of over one million restaurants.
While Zomato has made significant leaps and strides since its inception in 2008, its rapid international expansion has led to deeper waters– with bigger fish.
While Zomato has been sparring with Yelp ever since it made its move on the Canadian market in October of 2014, Zomato’s other consumer-bases– which include Brazil, Italy, the Philippines, and Portugal to name a few– are largely underdeveloped, which allowed the Indian startup to expand with little pushback.
However, the U.S. is Yelp’s operational bastion; and the San Francisco-based company reigns supreme on smartphones and computers across North America. By Yelp’s count, it had an average of 139 million unique monthly users in the third quarter of 2014 alone.
Zomato’s traffic currently amounts to about a quarter of Yelp’s at 35 million per month, but is set to surge to 80 million after Urbanspoon join its international stable of companies.
The ambitious restaurant search provider is profitable in India and the U.A.E., but has a way to go until it make any such claims in the rest of the world.