Deepinder Goyal, Founder & CEO, Zomato
India is a country of foodies. We always want to get information about restaurant around us. Zomato made it easy. We can get information about restaurants and share information about restaurants to help others. The users can use this website that will provide in-depth information about restaurants and events (e.g. menu cards, contact details, pictures, directions, rating and reviews) to its users helping them make a well informed decision before stepping outside their house.
Zomato, founded in 2008, is India’s largest restaurant guide listing over 42,000 restaurants across 12 cities in the country – Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Lucknow and Indore. Deepinder Goyal, Founder & CEO, Foodiebay.com, Current name is Zomato. He is graduated from IIT Delhi. He graduated in Mathematics & Computing (2005 batch). It was in 2008 when he was working with Bain and Company, a management consulting firm, when he put all menu cards in his office on the internet. He started an online ordering food portal right after IIT Delhi” Foodiebay.com”.
Deepinder’s juniors from college, Pankaj Chaddah and Gunjan Patidar, joined him in building the database. Foodiebay officially started in July 2008 with a list of 1,200 restaurants in the Delhi NCR region. This database expanded to 2,000 restaurants by end 2008. Within the next six months, Kolkata and Mumbai were included on the website.
Pankaj Chaddah (co-founder) and he started Zomato while they were still at Bain. He quit his job around a couple of years ago to focus on Zomato full-time. Now almost 65 peoples worked at zomato.
In 2010, the website was named among the top 25 most promising internet companies in India by the SmartTechie Magazine.
By June 2010, the website broke even and had expanded its reach to Bangalore and Pune. That is when Infoedge, the parent company of the Naukri.com group, invested 47 million in the business.
In November 2010, Foodiebay.com was renamed Zomato.com. The brand name was changed in November 2010, due to a possible move outside of the food vertical and also to avoid a possible conflict with eBay, because the earlier brand name Foodiebay contained ‘ebay’ in it.
By 2011, Zomato launched coverage in Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. Also in 2011, Zomato launched applications for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices.
Zomato also launched a print version of the content on the website in collaboration with Citibank in May 2012. The guides are marketed and sold under the name “Citibank Zomato Restaurant Guide”. During the launch, these guides were made available for four cities in India—Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune.
