Zomato has acquired the US-based online table reservation platform NexTable. The news comes right after Zomato’s foray into online ordering. Zomato co-founder and COO Pankaj Chaddah said, “We want to own the communication layer between restaurants and customers. NexTable will add to this layer by bringing in the convenience of easy, online reservations for thousands of restaurants to our millions of users.”Also, NexTable will soon be renamed to Zomato Book. With the acquisition, Zomato has also announced that it will be launching Table Booking service in July this year, starting with India, UAE and Australia.
Zomato Book (table reservations). Coming to you in July – starting with Australia, UAE and India. pic.twitter.com/nfLAqa75pO
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) April 22, 2015
About Zomato Book
Book is a cloud based platform that enables customers to make restaurant reservations online in real time and includes table management and marketing tools for restaurants. It will give Zomato another service to complement its listings, and potentially monetise them. Consumers will be able to search for a places to eat, check out recommendations and reviews from others, and then book a table there.
It also brings some interesting mobile innovations to Zomato, specifically, Zomato Book has developed their technology that lets restaurateurs update their data on the platform from smartphones and tablets, which makes a lot of sense considering the mobile nature of many of these businesses.
NexTable is a next generation, cloud based, reservation and table management system for the iPad, started by Phong Luong,TC DeSilva and Robert Tyree in 2012. “For any new table reservations product, no matter how good it is, it’s very hard to get businesses to adopt the product at scale for two reasons. First, it is hard to scale a sales team without massive funding. Secondly, it is hard to sell the product if you don’t have a significant consumer presence,” TC DeSilva said in a statement. “Zomato solves both these issues for us, and we are excited to partner with them to realise the true potential of what we have built.”
Its is a cash and stock deal, other terms of the deal have been left undisclosed. NexTable team will be joining Zomato.
NextTable is the ninth acquisition for Zomato. This year, Zomato had acquired 8 startups across globe MaplePOS being the latest and 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.
New Delhi based, 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.
