Online food ordering and restaurant reservation platform Zomato has ventured into the growing events space, and has launched Zomato Events. This is the first venture in the swelling events space by the Info Edge, Sequoia Capital and Ant Financial-backed venture, which was valued at about $2 billion post its last round of funding in October. Hospitality chains OYO and Treebo are amongst the other major Indian consumer internet start-ups that have entered the events space recently. Gaurav Gupta, chief operating officer at Zomato said, “At Zomato, given our focus on food, we tend to think of ourselves as a food company, and not just a food-tech company. We fundamentally believe that that the restaurant channel, or the out-of-home food cooking theme will be dominant as well, and we are trying to grow that as much as we can. “The idea behind doing this was to bring the food experience to the user, even if it’s an offline one, providing consumers a great experience with food offline as well.
Over the last couple of years, the company completes with the likes of Naspers-backed Swiggy, Uber-owned Uber Eats and Ola-owned Foodpanda, has expanded its suite of offerings, ranging from Zomato Collection, a curated list of restaurants, to its subscription-based service Zomato Gold. Zomaland, is a multi-city food carnival led by Chaitanya Mathur, formerly a co-founder of Grub Fest held at where street performances, pop-up restaurants and food exhibitions, among others.
Zomaland, which will kick off early next year, will be initially held across four cities, and the company is looking forward to partner with more than 400 restaurants for the ambitious event. The company expects over 200,000 footfalls during the course of the extravaganza, said Mr. Gupta. Gupta, however, remained silent to share how much the company, which has raised an estimated $635 million till date, will allocate towards Zomaland. He did, however, indicate that Zomato will consider taking undertaking events across markets outside India as well. Zomato ended FY18 with a 40% growth in revenues at Rs 466 crore. The firm also cut its corners tight squeezing losses by almost 73% to come in at Rs 106 crore in FY18 as compared to Rs 390 crore last year, according to financial documents filed with the registrar of companies and accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler.
