Priceline's $2.6 billion acquisition of OpenTable is driving the demand for restaurant booking services, and India's zomato.com is mounting a global challenge with Italian site Cibando its latest acquisition.
Zomato was founded in New Delhi in 2008 and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Info Edge and Vy Capital. In November it picked up $60 million in Series E funding, bringing the total raised to more than $110 million dollars.
The price paid for Cibando.com has not been disclosed, although reports say that Zomato has earmarked $6 million over the next two years to ramp up the Italian business which will be fully integrated into Zomato. Currently 82,000 restaurants in Italy can be booked via Cibando, which also features 7000 professionally-written reviews.
Zomato is now active in 18 countries, covering 110 cities.
Cibando is the fifth site it has bought in the past few months - the other deals
- MenuMania in New Zealand
- Lunchtime in Czech Republic
- Obedovat in Slovakia
- Gastronauci in Poland
While Priceline's megabucks deal to acquire OpenTable is by far the biggest in the sector, there have been others - from
TripAdvisor buying La Fourchette to
Concur investing in Table 8 via funding for sites such as
EatWith.And as the OTAs look for the total trip, and the GDSs look at more than just flights and hotels, restaurant booking sites could be one to watch in 2015.