Ant Financial, a Chinese payment company affiliated with Alibaba, has invested $210 million in India-based Zomato. Zomato enables users to discover over a million restaurants in more than 24 countries. With this round, Zomato has raised more than $650 million in total funding.
According to Economic Times, this investment gave Ant Financial a stake at a little more than 10%. And it gives Zomato a valuation at about $2 billion. When Zomato raised $150 million earlier this year, the company was valued at $1.1 billion. Ant Financial held a 20-22% stake in Zomato and this investment will likely make the Chinese financial company the largest shareholder in the company.
As of September, Zomato saw a 21 million monthly order run rate. And the company saw its highest daily order volume hit 700,000 orders in the month of September. Based on those numbers, Zomato said that it is currently the market leader in the food delivery business in India.
“I am happy to share that we’ve hit 21 million monthly food orders in India. This does not include the orders that are placed over the phone on Zomato. i.e. ~2 million orders. That means as a platform we facilitate 23 million monthly orders, (as far as we know) making us the market leader in the food ordering space in India,” said Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal in a blog post. “But who cares about phone call orders in 2018? We don’t. So let’s call it 21. To share perspective on the growth that we have experienced – at the beginning of 2018, we were at 3.5 million orders a month.”
One of Zomato’s largest competitors is Swiggy. Since 2015, Ziggy raised over $450 million in funding from companies like DST Global and Naspers. And rumor has it that Swiggy is in talks with Tencent about raising another round of funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion.
