Zomato Acquires Urbanspoon; Expands to US, Canada, and Australia

Zomato, the popular restaurant discovery service, on Monday announced its acquisition of Urbanspoon, a similar restaurant recommendation service operational in the US, Canada, and Australia.

With the acquisition, Zomato has now entered the US, Canada and Australia, adding the countries to its service that is already available in India, UK, Brazil and few other countries. The service now with the added 350 cities under its radar, is expecting over 80 million visits to its website, which was limited up to 35 million before the acquisition.

As mentioned by Zomato on its blog post, the restaurant recommendation service is now covering over 1 million restaurants under its service worldwide, alongside 1.4 million reviewers, and is expecting over 31 million app downloads across the globe. The firm adds that Urbanspoon's website and app will be integrated with Zomato over the coming months.

"As we stand here now, we felt joining forces with Urbanspoon would be the best way to turbocharge our growth and make our way into the US, Canada and Australia. Without question, this will also help us take significant strides forward in the markets we've been sharing with Urbanspoon so far - the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland," added the blog post.

Zomato's latest acquisition has also encouraged the service to go head-to-head against popular rival, Yelp. "The biggest challenge and most fun part of this move, however, is the fight we're going to be picking with Yelp... After all, like Mark Twain famously said, it isn't the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

Headquartered in India, Zomato is set to commence its cashless payments service in February, starting with Dubai. The move has been long predicted, ever since an update to the app in September added a category named Payments with a placeholder coming soon image as the actual functionality wasn't there yet.

At the time, Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, also told NDTV Gadgets that Zomato was working on a chat facility which would enable users to connect with restaurants and place orders for delivery.