The Indian restaurant reservation and technology company Zomato has moved into its Series F with $50 million led by Info Edge, along with Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital.
The company has also purchased Indian restaurant POS company Maple POS, which offers a customizable Android-based POS system with both front- and back-of-house features.
Zomato made news earlier this year for targeting Yelp with its purchase of Seattle-based UrbanSpoon. The company is clearly heading deeper into the restaurant space, eyeing a full POS integration that could compete directly with the likes of OpenTable and Yelp's own SeatMe.
The driving force seems to be towards the core of restaurant operations and being able to deliver the customer through the door and then follow through the experience throughout. Payments would also be seamless, as would be the direct collection of enormous amounts of data that is currently challenging for more restaurateurs to surface.
The MaplePOS system has already been renamed as "Zomato Base," emphasizing just how the company sees the acquisition playing out as a base of operations for a vertically-integrated tech solution for restaurants.
In announcing the purchase, the company also says that MaplePOS has a "stealth feature which Zomato claims will change the way restaurants go about their business. Forever."
Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, followed this statement up, saying:
Zomato is the only food-tech company in the world which is building products for consumers as well as restaurant owners. There is a lot that can be done if we are able to build a technology platform that connects consumers to restaurants and vice versa, and we believe that a world-class cloud-based POS system is the first step towards building that platform. MaplePOS is a great point-of-sale product, and we are excited about the prospect of working with the MaplePOS team to build this further.
For more on Zomato, here is a transcript of Goyal's latest analyst briefing from January 2015. It reveals much about strategy and user acquisition for the growing portfolio of products.