Indian food delivery start-up Zomato filed for initial public offering on Wednesday, ushering in a new era for technology unit startups in the world’s second-largest Internet market after years of promising growth. The 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered Indian startup, which considers Info Edge and Ant Group as its largest investors, plans to raise $1.1 billion (About 1 billion by issuing new shares) from the IPO, it has filed.
The startup, which has started trading in 24 markets, wants to be listed on the Indian stock exchanges NSE and BSE. There is a lot going on in the list of Zomato’s events on Indian stock exchanges. A successful listing is ready to encourage about a dozen other Unicorn Indian startups to accelerate their efforts to tap into public markets.
Indian startups have raised millions of dollars over the past decade, but so far have been reluctant to tap the public market. In recent years, a successful list of a handful of companies, including IndiaMart, and mobile gaming company Nazara, have shown that investors in India have a strong appetite for technology stocks. Zomato shared some key insights into the filing today:
- Zomato has raised more than $2.2 billion, according to research firm Tracxn. The startup was valued at $5.4 billion in the most recent funding round. Zomato acquired Uber Eats ’India business last year, and as part of the deal gave the American ride-healing firm a 9.9% stake in Zomato. (On one side note, it only appears once Uber turns a profit when some market sells its business in the local market.)
- Zomato says in recent years it has improved the single economy of the food supply business.
- As of December 2020, the startup had 161,637 active delivery partners, with 350,174 lists of active restaurants on the platform, including 132,769 restaurants that actively distributed to customers.
- Zomato said it survived the Covid crisis by going through the metric GOV (Gross Order Value) in the third quarter of last year. But a few lines of its business, including the dining-out business, “are still recovering as customers are reluctant to dine out as a precautionary measure.”
- The startup, which employs 3,469 people worldwide by December 31, plans to expand its Zomato Pro membership offer, which allows customers to take advantage of additional benefits and provide Hyperpure, its B2B business, and deepen previous relationships with restaurant partners in the future.
