Indian Zomato buys Cibando, enters Italian market

Zomato, backed by India's VY capital, Info Edge and Aequoia investment, continued a massive takeover of global market expansion. After acquiring two local companies in Central and Eastern Europe, it soon swallowed the cibando of Italy's naked brush.

India's Gourmet search engine, Zomato, similar to the domestic audience, was founded in July 2008 and is headquartered in New Delhi and currently operates in more than 20 countries. In November 2013, Zomato began to accelerate the pace of international expansion after receiving a $37 million D round of financing, and in July 2014, Zomato acquired New Zealand's Restaurant search service company menumania;2014 August, Zomato has acquired the Czech lunchtime.cz and Slovakia's obedovat.sk to expand its influence in Europe. In November 2014, Zomato received 60 million dollars in financing, with a total financing of $1.13 trillion, valued at $660 million trillion. Cibando is one of the largest gourmet search engines in Italy, with more than 82,000 restaurants in several cities in Italy. What's special about it is its visual operation. After opening the app, on its display map, with the position of the finger circle, the app will show the dishes of the restaurant in the circle, and help the user make the decision more intuitively through the visual effects of multiple images.

Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but according to Zomato, Cibando's entire team will be integrated into the company, leveraging Cibando's original rich content base, flow and user base to help Zomato build the Italian market. The first step is to integrate the Cibando data and transform these original resources into new effective user groups and traffic.

After that, Zomato plans to increase the number of Italian teams in Rome and Milan proportionately. Over the next three months, the original 10-person team from Cibando expanded to 30-40 full-time employees. In the next 2 years, Zomato will continue to invest $6 million in the Italian market, expanding the group of 6 Italian cities to 150-200 people. It can be seen that, compared to other pure Internet enterprises, Zomato to the offline service capacity requirements are very high, need enough manpower to support.

So far, Zomato has been scanning the menus of restaurants through OCR (optical Character recognition, optical character recognition) systems. Every three months thereafter, Zomato team members go to the restaurant to reconfirm the menu to keep the data updated. This heavy-line "push" labor-intensive business model, significantly different from its competitors Yelp, Urbanspoon, OpenTable and TripAdvisor, is also one of Zomato core competitiveness.

Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah said Yelp was its sole competitor in the Italian market, but he did not see it as a threat. In addition, Zomato prefers to expand as much as possible by acquiring local companies, and is currently in merger talks with 4 other companies.

This article is compiled by Zhu Wenmin