Zomato has made its first product acquisition, the online food guide has acquired Delhi-based MapleGraph, the company behind MaplePOS, a cloud-based point of sale product for restaurants. MaplePOS’s original service has been shut down as the product has been absorbed into Zomato’s platform and has been renamed as, ‘Zomato Base’, the startup offers restaurants features such as menu and inventory management, and has a built-in payment solution to accept debit and credit card payments.
“This acquisition takes us a step closer to providing end-to-end tech to the restaurant industry. In an industry that has seen very little technology penetration so far, we’re excited to be driving this change at a large scale,” said Zomato.
About Zomato Base
Base is an incredibly functional Android-based POS system that uses custom hardware for a more reliable and flexible product experience. It offers restaurants features such as menu and inventory management, and has a built-in payment solution to accept debit and credit card payments.
Zomato Base will be topped with features such as Menu Management, Inventory Management, Recipe Management, Customer Relationship Management, Data Analytics, Electronic Receipts, Offline Transaction Support, Payment Gateway Integration and a stealth feature that will change the way restaurants go about their business (watch this space for details).
MaplePOS was developed by MapleGraph, a company founded in 2011 by Arun Tangri, Varun Tangri, and Abhishek Rohilla. The startup offers software to manage menus, inventory, recipes, electronic receipts and is further working on few more features which Zomato declined to disclose. MapleGraph Co-Founder and CEO Arun Tangri said “We are excited to partner with Zomato to realise our dream of building the best and most widely adopted restaurant point-of-sale system in the world.”
Startups like Posist, FusionResto and Done are also operating in the same space.
Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder said, “There is a lot that can be done if we are able to build a technology platform that connects consumers to restaurants and vice versa, and we believe that a world-class cloud-based POS system is the first step towards that.”
Zomato was launched in 2008 and has now expanded over 22 countries and 400,000 restaurants listed on their site. Zomato has raised $60 Mn last November and another $50 Mn recently, valuing it around $1 Bn (according to Techcrunch).
In past one year, Zomato had acquired 7 startups across globe including Urbanspoon which was acquired for $52 Mn to enter the US and Australian markets, Turkey’s popular restaurant research service firm Mekanist, Italy-based web and mobile restaurant search services startup Cibando Ltd; MenuMania in New Zealand; Lunchtime in the Czech Republic; Obedovat in Slovakia; and Gastronauci in Poland.
The online food services market is valued at over $14 Bn in India and $371 Bn globally and increasingly technology is becoming an integral part of servicing the palette.
“We’ll be working on integrating Base’s services into our consumer products over the next few months, and restaurant businesses across the world will be able to harness the power of Zomato Base this fall,” said the company.
Related: “You Can’t Start A Zomato Today & Succeed”, Says Deepinder Goyal, In His AMA Thread On Reddit
