Zomato Story – Zomato Business Model | How Zomato Started?

Introduction

Zomato is India’s leading restaurant discovery app. It was started by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008. Zomato works as an aggregator between restaurants and foodies.

It helps the foodies to discover, rate, and review the restaurants, and cafes based upon their experience across 10,000 cities in the 24 nations include, India, United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Turkey, UAE, Qatar, Portugal, South Africa, New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Sri Lanka.

Now let’s see, how Zomato was started,

How Zomato started.

Zomato was started with the name ‘Foodiebay’ in 2008  and later renamed as Zomato in November 2010. It happened because the founders didn’t want to confine themselves with only Food Business and also to avoid the confusion with the brand “eBay”, because it sounds similar to Foodiebay.

Firstly, Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah started all the menu items from their nearby restaurant and list on their intranet website, after getting some popularity and regular traffic they launched their public website in 2008. After launching the website, they started listing restaurants in Delhi NCR, and quickly extended to Kolkata and then Mumbai.

In 2012, the startup company propelled a print variant of the website in association with Citi bank as “Citibank Zomato Restaurant Guide”. Additionally, Zomato extended its presence abroad to the UAE, Sri Lanka, Qatar, UK, Netherlands, Turkey, Brazil, and so on.

Subsequently, Zomato ceaselessly expanded in the worldwide market and peaked in India too. It has a wide reach on its site- about 90 million people visit the site and versatile applications.

Now, Zomato is getting almost 15.2 Million traffic per month organically with more than 71 thousand backlinks. (As per Ahrefs.com)

Here is the organic traffic growth chart of Zomato since April 2015.

Zomato Products and Services

They started with only a food discovery app. Now, they have expanded to various macro sections in the food industry,

Here’s a list of services given by Zomato,

• Restaurant Ratings & Reviews,
• Restaurant Search & Discovery,
• Online Order: Food Delivery,
• Quick 15-minute food delivery service
• Table Reservations
• Hyperpure: Ingredients supplied to restaurants,
• Gold: Restaurant premium subscription services
• Zomaland: Multicity of food and entertainment carnival
• Zomato LIVE: book tickets for Zomato live events
• District App: offers dining, entertainment and ticketing services
• Zomato Feeding India:  NGO that works with Zomato to provide food support to underserved communities in India.

Zomato Business Model – How Zomato Earns?

If you’re a Foodie, I’m sure you’ve used Zomato at least one time. Did you ever think, how Zomato earns?

If you’re thinking Zomato earns only a commission from the restaurants, delivery charges, and their membership. That’s not only their overall source of earning money. Zomato is continuously experimenting and growing their business and revenue.

Currently, Zomato earns from in-app advertising, subscriptions, food delivery service, and Zomato Gold. Apart from all these, Zomato also organizes Food event,s and attendees pay a small fee for a ticket.

Let’s explore all these methods in detail,

Online Ordering Service: Zomato takes a certain percentage from the restaurants on each sale done through the Zomato app/website.

In-App Advertising: Advertisement is one of the major contributors to Zomato’s Revenue. It allows restaurants to buy space or bid on a particular city, on their app and pay for it. It can be a restaurant listing, banners, sliders. It works similar to Google search and display ads

Delivery Charges: Zomato also charges a delivery fee from the users. It may depend upon your order size and the distance between you and the restaurant. It may vary from Rs.0 to Rs.50.

Organizes Events: Zomato also started organising food events with a name “Zomaland“. The sale of event tickets and sponsorships are contributed in their revenue.

Zomato Hyperpure: It helps restaurants by delivering reliable and fresh groceries and ingredients like fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, milk, and more. Zomato delivers these groceries to the restaurants and charges a delivery fee and a small commission from the Kirana store owners.

Zomato Gold: Zomato Gold is a membership program that gives special perks like a free dish or up to two free drinks every time you visit partner restaurants or bars in India. Members can use it any day, at any time, on any menu item. 

You can buy the membership for 3 months or a year through the Zomato app. It gives some additional benefits to the customer like buy 1, get 1 on cold drinks, extra discounts, free delivery, and much more.

Zomato Funding Rounds

As of January 2025, Zomato has a market cap of ₹2.173 Trillion.

Zomato Acquisitions: Startups Acquired By Zomato

Zomato has previously acquired 13 other startups over time that helped it in a major expansion globally. The complete list is given below:

Zomato Competitors

Zomato faces a lot of competition in India from several food delivery and restaurant discovery platforms. Swiggy is the direct competitor to Zomato in the food industry. Zomato’s other competitors are Eatsure, Deliveroo, and Freshmenu.

International Competitors Of Zomato

1)-  Doordash

2)- UberEats

3)- Grubhub

4)- Postmates

5)- ChowNow

More About Zomato

Zomato Legal Name: Zomato Media Private Limited

Headquarter: Gurgaon, India

No. of Employees working with Zomato: over 18,730 employees

In 2023, Zomato received over 647 million orders, which was a 21% increase compared to the previous year when they had over 535 million orders.

Zomato serves 1.3 million orders each day from 150000 restaurants across India. It served more than 800 cities in 2023.

In the last quarter of the financial year 2024, Zomato’s food deliveries earned 20.5 billion rupees, which was more than the amount earned in the earlier quarters.

FAQs – Zomato