Zomato Project

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Introduction

Zomato is an Indian restaurant aggregator and food delivery start


up founded by Deepinder Goyal in 2008. Zomato provides
information, menus and user-reviews of restaurants, and also has
food delivery options from partner restaurants in select cities. As
of 2019, the service is available in 24 countries and in more than
10,000 cities.
History
Zomato was founded as Foodiebay in 2008 and
renamed Zomato in 2010. In 2011, Zomato expanded across
India to Delhi
NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and Kolkata. In 2012,
the company expanded operations internationally in several
countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Sri
Lanka, Qatar, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and South
Africa. In 2013, Zomato was launched in New Zealand,
Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia, with its website and apps available
in Turkish, Brazilian
Portuguese, Indonesian and English languages. In April 2014,
Zomato launched its services in Portugal, followed by launches
in Canada, Lebanon and Ireland.
The acquisition of Seattle-based food portal Urbanspoon marked
the firm's entry into the United States, Canada and Australia, and
brought it into direct competition with similar models such
as Yelp and Foursquare.
With the introduction of .xxx domains in 2011, Zomato also
launched zomato.xxx, a site dedicated to food porn.[19] In May
2012, it launched a print version of the website named "Citibank
Zomato Restaurant Guide," in collaboration with Citibank, but it
has since been discontinued.
In February 2017, Zomato announced plans to launch a service to
help restaurants expand their presence without incurring any fixed
costs. In September 2017, Zomato claimed the company had
"turned profitable" in all 24 countries where it operated and
introduced a "zero commission model" for partner
restaurants. Towards the end of 2017, Zomato stopped accepting
updates from its active users by not utilising moderators to verify
and make updates. Users of the app reported issues with new
features to pay for orders.
Zomato narrowed down its losses by 34% to ₹389 Cr for the
financial year 2016–17, from ₹590.1 Cr crore in the previous year
2015-16.
In September 2019, Zomato fired almost 10% of its workforce
(540 people) tending to back-end activities like customer service,
merchant and delivery partner support functions.

Investments

Between 2010-13, Zomato raised approximately US$16.7 million


from Info Edge India, giving them a 57.9% stake in Zomato. In
November 2013, it raised an additional US$37 million
from Sequoia Capital and Info Edge India.
In November 2014, Zomato completed another round of funding
of US$60 million at a post-money valuation of ~US$660 million.
This round of funding was being led jointly by Info Edge India and
Vy Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital.
While in April 2015, Info Edge India, Vy Capital and Sequoia
Capital led another round of funding for US$50 million. This was
followed by another US$60 million funding led by Temasek,
a Singapore government-owned investment company, along with
Vy Capital in September.
In October 2018, Zomato raised $210 million from Alibaba's
payment affiliate Ant Financial. Ant Financial received an
ownership stake of over 10% of the company as part of the round,
which valued Zomato at around $2 billion. Zomato had also raised
an additional $150 million also from Ant Financial earlier in 2018.

Acquisitions
Zomato has acquired 12 startups globally. In July 2014, Zomato
made its first acquisition by buying Menu-mania for an
undisclosed sum.The company pursued other acquisitions such
as lunchtime.cz and obedovat.sk for a combined US$3.25
million.In September 2014, Zomato acquired Poland-based
restaurant search service Gastronauci for an undisclosed
sum. Three months later, it acquired Italian restaurant search
service Cibando.
Zomato also acquired Seattle-based food portal, Urbanspoon, for
an estimated $60 million in 2015. Other acquisitions of 2015
include Mekanist in an all-cash deal, the Delhi-based startup
MapleGraph that built MaplePOS (renamed Zomato Base), and
NexTable, a US-based table reservation and restaurant
management platform.
In 2016, the company acquired Sparse Labs, a logistics
technology startup, and the food delivery startup, Runnr, in 2017.
In September 2018, Zomato acquired Bengaluru-based food e-
marketplace, TongueStun Food, for about $18 million in a cash
and stock deal.In December 2018, Zomato acquired Lucknow-
based startup, TechEagle Innovations, that works exclusively on
drones, for an undisclosed amount. Zomato claimed that the
acquisition will help pave the way towards drone-based food
delivery in India, building technology aimed at a hub-to-hub
delivery network.
On 21st January, 2020, Zomato acquired its rival Uber Eats'
business in India in an all stock deal.

Security Breaches

On 4 June 2015, an Indian security researcher hacked the


Zomato website and gained access to information about 62.5
million users. Using the vulnerability, he was able to access
personal data of users such as telephone numbers, email
addresses and Instagram private photos using their Instagram
access token. Zomato fixed the issue within 48 hours of it
becoming apparent. On 15 October 2015, Zomato changed
business strategies from a Full-Stack market to an Enterprise
market. This led Zomato to reduce its workforce by 10%, or
around 300 people.
On 18 May 2017, a security blog called Hackread claimed over 17
million accounts had been breached. "The database includes
emails and password hashes of Zomato users, while the price
was set for the whole package is $1,001.43 (Bitcoins 0.5587). The
vendor also shared a trove of sample data to prove it is legit", the
Hackread's post said. Hackread claimed details of 17 million
users had meanwhile been sold on the Dark Web. Zomato
confirmed that names, email addresses and encrypted passwords
were taken from its database. The company reassured affected
customers that no payment information or credit card details were
stolen.
Zomato said the security measures it uses to ensure the stolen
passwords cannot be converted back into normal text, but it still
urged users who use the same password on other services to
change them. It also logged the affected users out of the app and
reset their passwords. "So far, it looks like an internal (human)
security breach - some employee's development account got
compromised", the company said in a blog post but later, when
Zomato contacted the hacker, they discovered a loophole in their
security. The hacker removed the stolen content from Dark Web
asking for a healthy bug bounty programme.

Controversies
"Food has no religion" tweet
In July 2019, Zomato received a Hindu customer's complaint that
he was assigned a non-Hindu delivery boy for his food order
in Jabalpur and had asked Zomato to provide a Hindu delivery
boy. The customer alleged that Zomato had refused to change
the rider after which he asked to cancel the order. The customer
then posted this incident on social media site, Twitter after which
Zomato responded to the message stating: "Food doesn't have a
religion. It is a religion.", as a response. The tweet received mixed
responses, and some users criticized the company for using Jain
food and halal tags on food items. The company issued a
clarification that these tags were placed by restaurant owners and
not by Zomato.
Logout campaign
On 17 August 2019, more than 1,200 restaurants logged off from
Zomato because of their offer of discount programmes at dine-in
restaurants.In Pune alone, more than 450 restaurants stopped
serving to Zomato Gold because of aggressive discounts and loss
of business.However, Zomato founder Goyal admitted mistake,
became ready to rectify it and called for sanity and truce.He also
urged restaurants to stop #Logout campaign.

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