Zomato raises $37 million from Sequoia Capital for overseas expansion

Zomato, the popular restaurant search service, has announced a fresh round of funding of $37 million (Rs. 231.5 crores approximately) from Sequoia Capital and existing investors Info Edge. This takes Zomato's total funding to over USD 53 million; Zomato had earlier raised USD 16.5 million from Info Edge over four rounds of funding.

"This round is going to fund these 22 countries. The approach we are following for international expansion is that we budget for a particular country and we keep that money on the side," founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal told TechCrunch. "We don't touch that money. So every country has a separate budget and each team has to break even on a separate budget.

Zomato has also announced the launch of its services in three new countries - Brazil (Sao Paulo), Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara), and Indonesia (Jakarta). In these three countries, Zomato will be available in local languages as well - Portuguese, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesia respectively. In addition to these, Zomato has also expanded its services within UK from three cities to five, with the inclusion of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The US is on its list but it plans to tweak its feature set so it can offer something attractive enough to crack the market so isn't going to tackle that market immediately. "It will take us another six to 12 months to enter the U.S.," Goyal said. "There are a lot of product changes that we need to do to make sure we are ready to enter the U.S."

Zomato updates menu cards every three months across all restaurants, and provides updated scanned menu cards for over 160,000 restaurants across the 11 countries of its presence. Users can access all this information on Zomato's website available at www.zomato.com or download Zomato's mobile apps for iOS, Android or Windows.