TripAdvisor said today that it has acquired Australian restaurant booking platform, Dimmi.
The amount was not disclosed. Dimmi had raised about $15 million (AUS) from investors, including CMB and the venture capital arms of Telstra and Village Roadshow -- plus angel investor Robbie Cooke (co-founder of online travel agency Wotif.)
The Sydney-based company will join TripAdvisor's restaurant division, TheFork, which has more than 24,000 restaurant partners across 10 markets. It had $4.2 million (AUS) in turnover last year and is forecasting $8 million this year.
It's a big day for the CEO of Dimmi, Stevan Premutico, who founded the site in 2009, during the depths of the global recession.
But TripAdvisor began a relationship with the startup years ago. In 2012, the companies signed an initial partnership. It was put into effect in 2013, and let TripAdvisor users make real-time restaurant bookings its website and app that were powered by Dimmi.
Dimmi claims to be Australia's largest reservations network. It features more than 2,500 restaurants in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and elsewhere -- or about 30% of Australia's restaurants. It claims to process about 1 in 10 reservations in Australia now.
Most of the participating restaurants pay Dimmi $150 (AUS) a month to be on its platform, with various back-end table-management and database services, plus a commission of $1 to $3 for every diner seated.
In Australia, Dimmi's main competitor has been Urbanspoon, which was snapped up by restaurant search app Zomato earlier this year. Other rivals include Bookarestaurant and Obee. OpenTable remains a global leader in most of the markets it operates in.
Dimmi's content will be added to TheFork (LaFourchette, in French), a consumer-facing restaurant search brand TripAdvisor has been supporting with flash-deals that are emailed to users and that is run by Bertrand Jelensperger.
Earlier today, TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer was speaking with investors at a conference in Boston where he hinted that additional acquisitions in the restaurant booking platforms globally were in the works.
"We have chosen to expand organically and through acquisition in more countries in Europe — and potentially elsewhere in the world — where there isn’t a big incumbent leader. We like the model.
It’s a frequent use case. It leverages are existing traffic. It’s something we already know how to do. And when you get to scale, it works profit-wise."
For more from that interview, see "TripAdvisor’s Kaufer defends Instant Booking, teases an itinerary-builder tool"