Online restaurant discovery and food delivery platform Zomato has said it is raising $62.5 million (about Rs 441 crore) in a fresh round of funding led by Naspers-backed German food-tech major Delivery Hero.
The capital infusion is part of Zomato’s ongoing Series I round, and is likely to value the Gurgaon-headquartered company at about $2 billion. Also participating in the round are Chinese investors Shunwei Capital and Saturn Shine, according to filings submitted to the Registrar of Companies.
Delivery Hero’s Rs 350 crore investment in Zomato will give it a 2% stake in the Deepinder Goyal-led company, while Shunwei Capital is putting in Rs 35.06 crore for a 0.23% stake, according to VCCircle, which was the first to report the developments.
Saturn Shine will pump in the rest to pick up 0.36% stake in Zomato. The fund infusion comes less than a month after Ant Financial and Sequoia Capital-backed Zomato raised about $40 million from US-based investor Glade Brook Capital Partners, as part of the same funding round.
Berlin-based Delivery Hero, which sold its Foodpanda India business to ride hailing platform Ola last year, marking the latter’s maiden foray into the food delivery space, counts South African media conglomerate Naspers as one of its largest institutional backers.
Naspers is also the largest stakeholder in rival food delivery company Swiggy, and had led a $1 billion funding round in the Bengaluru-based company in December last year. At the time, Naspers had said it had invested $660 million in Swiggy, with Tencent, Hillhouse Capital and Wellington Management also joining the investor cap table.
Separately, Zomato also announced that it has opened a new 30,000 sq ft ‘Hyperpure’ warehouse in Bengaluru. Hyperpure sells supplies ranging from vegetables, fruits and meat to dairy to beverages to restaurants through a technology-driven platform.
Zomato further plans to open a Hyperpure warehouse in Delhi, and then in another nine more cities by the end of this year, and eventually expand into international markets.
“This development kickstarted in August 2018, with the launch of Hyperpure. Within three months of launch, we rapidly grew to supplying 350 restaurants in Bengaluru by November 2018 (and subsequently nearly 1,000 merchants, today). This remarkable increase in demand led us to realise we needed a significantly larger scale of operations to meet the growing need for ingredients and produce,” Zomato said in a blogpost.
In a statement, Zomato said it works directly with a large network — farmers, mills, producers, and processors —which enables it to provide high-quality-produce at competitive prices. The food-tech firm has 100 suppliers in the system.
“This is a first-of-its-kind initiative at such a scale that is breaking down the supply chain so fewer people are involved, and more efficiency is created (thereby reducing food wastage),” said Dhruv Sawhney, founder, Hyperpure. “Also, every fresh ingredient that we source, we can trace back to the farm it has come from. In some time, when you are eating palak paneer at your favourite desi restaurant, we will be able to tell you where the palak came from, and when it was harvested.”
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