Pankaj and Deepinder started Zomato, an online and mobile restaurant discovery guide out of a living room in New Delhi in 2008. They have since served 132 million foodies (20 million monthly visits), list 233,000 restaurants in 41 cities, 12 countries, employ over 700 people and have secured $54 million in funding (Sequoia Capital, Info Edge).
While working as consultants at Bain in New Delhi, Pankaj Chaddah and Deepinder Goyal had a problem with huge stacks of menu cards. They decided to organise them by scanning the menus and uploading them onto a local intranet. It was an instant hit with the colleagues.
That is how a restaurant discovery guide was started in 2008. They called it
foodiebay.com. The duo started by covering 1,200 restaurants in New Delhi region and worked to gradually expand their reach. Two years later it was renamed to
Zomato.com.
Zomato is, unlike most other tech startups, based in India and expanding west. We will talk to Zomato's Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Pankaj Chaddah about Zomato's incredible journey from starting in a living room to one of most disrupting companies in the restaurant industry.
