It's not Flipkart or Snapdeal or even Naukri. An Indian website that has all the trappings to become its first major brand globally is homegrown restaurants-listing site Zomato.
This morning, the website announced its fifth acquisition in six months , when it said it was buying out Italy's leading restaurant search service Cibando.
Between July and October this year, Zomato has snapped up competitors in New Zealand, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, and today it lists over 300,000 restaurants in the 156 cities and 18 countries it is present in. In 2015, the company is aiming to start operations in 15 more countries.
So how did Zomato come about and how did it reach where it is today? And more importantly, can it become India's first consumer internet brand?
Zomato was created as Foodiebay.com by then 25-year-old Deepinder Goyal in his bedroom flat in 2008, along with a partner.
The company's name was later rechristened and it grew rapidly, first organically, and then after investors such as Info Edge (parent of Naukri.com) and Sequioa Capital came on, inorganically.
Following in the tradition of most previous successful start-ups such as Amazon, Twitter and Instagram, it hasn't been smooth-sailing on the financial front. While the company increased its revenues from Rs 2 crore in 2012 to Rs 30 crore in 2014, its losses ballooned from Rs 7 crore to Rs 41 crore over the same period.
At that rate, its last reported valuation of Rs 4,000 crore looks mind-bogglingly steep (at 133 times sales) but its backers are betting on the scale it has achieved.
"Young companies like Zomato don't get valued solely based on revenue multiples," Sequoia MD Mohit Bhatnagar told the Economic Times last year. "The product is world class and we have conviction in the founders. Deepinder is probably as good a founder as anyone anywhere in the world. It is the first Indian consumer internet company with global aspirations and that is the single-biggest excitement for us."
As of now, barring UK, Zomato has only entered markets where it does not have too many competitors – UAE, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, etc – but its real test would be when it enters the US, where larger competitors such as Yelp or Open Table await. Success there would establish it as a global brand.
In an ET piece, founder Goyal had said the potential of the US market was greater than all the 33 markets it intends to be present in. But he added that the company would be careful and take time – and raise more money – before launching its product there.
But if Zomato makes it big in the land of the Silicon Valley, one could bet on it to do for products what India's IT companies such as Infosys and TCS did for services – put it on the global map.
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