While working for Bain in 2008, lunch time for Deepinder Goyal
and Pankaj Chaddah meant queueing for the restaurant menus before deciding
their order. So the batch mates from IIT Delhi scanned menus and put them
online. Soon, around 100 colleagues visited the website everyday. That’s how
Foodiebay kicked off in July 2008 (re-branded as Zomato in 2010). Over the next
few months, the website went live with listings of 1,200 restaurants in Delhi.
Convinced of the potential, Goyal and Chaddah jumped into the job, backed by
InfoEdge, which has pumped in around Rs.18 crore into the venture.
Today, the 150-people strong Zomato touts itself as India’s
largest restaurant guide, listing over 30,000 eat-out places across 10 cities
in the country. Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and Russia are in the process of
joining the list soon. “We are all about food and where one can find the best
of it,” says Goyal. The challenge is to make the brand platform agnostic,
helping users discover places to eat around them through the web, mobile and
print, while retaining the “neighborhood restaurant guide tag”.
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