Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery

Food Rocket Raises $2M for 15 Minute Grocery Delivery in San Francisco

Add Food Rocket to the growing list of companies offering speedy, on-demand grocery delivery. The startup, which has launched its service in San Francisco, announced today that it has raised $2 million in funding from AltaIR Capital, Baring Vostok fund and AngelsDeck group of business angels.

Food Rocket is similar to other upstart on-demand grocery delivery services like Gorillas and Fridge No More in that it operates small, delivery-only “dark” stores in different neighborhoods. Shoppers use the Food Rocket mobile app to order groceries or ready-to-eat meals, which are delivered within 10 – 15 minutes. Right now, Food Rocket is available from 9 a.m – 9 p.m. in 20 different neighborhoods in San Francisco including SoMa, South Park, Mission Bay, Japantown, Hayes Valley and more. There is no minimum order requirement and no delivery fee.

Dark store-based, on-demand speedy grocery delivery is emerging as one of the big stories of 2021. In Europe especially, a number of such startups have raised hundreds of millions in funding including Getir, Glovo and the aforementioned Gorillas. In the U.S., Gopuff raised $1.5 billion for half hour delivery 24 hours a day, DoorDash is opening its own dark convenience stores and Fridge No More and Gorillas are both now operating in NYC. All of this activity has put time pressure on existing grocery delivery services like Instacart, which launched its own 30 minute delivery service in select cities this week.

For its part, Food Rocket is really looking to take off this year. While it’s starting off in San Francisco, the company plans to open 150 dark stores on the west coast, each capable of servicing at least 25,000 households.

Yum! Brands to Acquire Dragontail Systems

Yum! Brands has begun the process of acquiring Dragontail Systems, the two companies announced today. Under the agreement, the Louisville, Kentucky-based Yum! will pay $93.5 million in cash for all the share capital of Dragontail, which is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange. Dragontail Systems had raised $8.8 million in funding.

If successfully completed, the addition of Dragontail will bolster Yum! Brands’ delivery capabilities. Dragontail makes Algo, an AI-based restaurant workflow management system. Algo processes a restaurant’s incoming orders and manages when each item should be cooked in coordination with when a delivery driver will arrive.

In addition to managing kitchen workflow, Dragontail has introduced additional technologies to its stack over the past couple of years that augment and expand a restaurant’s delivery capabilities. Dragontail’s AI-based camera can be installed in kitchens for quality control. In addition to ensuring that pizzas are topped and cooked properly, they also were a means of communicating with the customer: Here’s a picture of your pizza! During the COVID pandemic last year, the camera was also used to check on sanitation conditions in kitchen workstations.

More recently, Dragontail integrated drone delivery into its automated workflow. The company is doing drone pizza delivery with Pizza Hut in Israel, and announced a partnership with Valqari, which makes smart lockers for drone delivery.

According to today’s press announcement, Dragontail’s technology is being used in 1,500 Pizza Hut restaurants in more than 10 countries. Yum! didn’t mention rival Domino’s, which has also used Dragontail’s solution in the past. When we checked in with Dragontail of April last year, it said its technology was being used in more than 2,500 stores (the number of Domino’s stores was not specified).

The acquisition comes at a time when takeout and delivery is more important than ever to the restaurant industry. With dine-in operations for many restaurants shut down last year, people have become accustomed to having food from any type of restaurant delivered to their door. In addition to Pizza Hut, Yum! also operates KFC, Taco Bell and Habit Burger. Both KFC and Taco Bell are placing more of an emphasis on to-go orders at their restaurants. It’s not hard to envision Dragontail’s technology being used not only to help coordinate delivery, but also with a brand’s mobile app to facilitate faster ordering and pickup via drive-thrus.

Yum! Brands acquisition of Dragontail still needs to meet Australian regulatory approval. In its press release, Yum! Brands said that it estimates the acquisition will have “an immaterial impact to its 2021 financial results.”

Delivery Has a Small But Vital Role When it Comes to Normalizing Cultivated Meat

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Setting aside scalability, price parity, and regulatory approvals for a moment, one of the major challenges for cultivated meat makers will be getting people to actually buy their products en masse and on a regular basis.

We’ve written before about restaurants being a critical step in this journey, and after this week, I would add restaurant delivery to that process, too. The industry-wide shift to delivery wrought by the pandemic forced the restaurant biz to get pretty creative in terms of what it can do with delivery. Similar energy could be put towards delivering consumers an entire education about cultivated meat, not just a meal in a box.

There’s currently only one company in the world that’s even allowed to sell cultivated meat in restaurants right now — Eat Just, which nabbed the first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat at the end of 2020 and subsequently started selling its GOOD chicken product at Singapore restaurant 1880. The San Francisco-based Eat Just has since struck a deal with Delivery Hero’s food panda service to deliver meals from 1880. This week, Eat Just announced (among other things) that it is doing something similar with JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan restaurant. To start, GOOD chicken dishes will only be available from Madame Fan with delivery orders.

When I talked to Eat Just’s CEO Josh Tetrick this past week, he was admittedly a little more blasé about delivery than I’m being at the moment: “It just was kind of as simple as, ‘It’d be nice if people could eat meat without slaughter in their homes. So let’s do delivery.'” Delivery Hero happens to be an investor in Eat Just, and food panda happens to be one of Asia’s biggest delivery services. Those convenient factors made delivery something of a no-brainer for the company to pursue.

But Tetrick also pointed out that delivery is part of the overall process of getting cultivated meat out of the lab and onto our plates. “Start with regulatory approval,” he said. “Then it’s getting on a menu. Then it’s having a family sit down and have a chicken dinner together. Then you can go to a retailer and buy [it]. All these things create a context in which this idea of making meat — which seemed like it was some futuristic thing a year ago — suddenly becomes a way that people just eat meat.”

Restaurants have historically played a role in the evolution of what we eat. But thanks to the forces at work, both technological and pandemic-related, restaurants are no longer just in-person experiences between the four walls of a dining room. If there was one idea that’s been dissected ad infinitum over the last year, it’s that the word “restaurant” now encompasses a far wider range of experiences. One of the biggest is delivery.

The pandemic accelerated rather than created delivery’s popularity, which means as a meal format, it won’t go by the wayside anytime soon. Numbers may taper off a bit as the world reopens, but many consumers have already said they will continue to order delivery on a regular basis. That makes it an integral part of the restaurant industry that anyone looking to enter the biz needs to pay attention to. Like cultivated meat companies.

If we go by the example Eat Just/GOOD have set, that involves more than putting some lab-grown chicken bites in a cardboard box. Tetrick said that delivery for the Madam Fan deal will operate similar to what his company did with its original 1880/food panda deal. Customers can choose from a few different dishes (chicken and rice, katsu curry, etc.). Meals are delivered to customers along with a Google Cardboard viewer and a link to a 360-degree short film about meat. Tetrick described the film as follows:

“You you put the glasses on and you’re in the midst of a rain forest in South America. Then it transitions to the rain forests being removed, and you see that it’s connected to planting lots of soy and corn. And you see how the soy and corn is connected to feed going to animals, and you see how that’s connected to your plate and how we could do something different.”

The point is to help consumers familiarize themselves with the term “cultivated meat” and explain why it matters for the health of the plant (more food made with fewer resources) and how that big-picture context fits into each individual consumer’s life, whether they’re in Singapore or Tennessee.

Longer term, immersive experiences like the above could help with what’s something of an end game for cultivated meat: getting people to think of it as just meat. Not “lab-grown meat” or “slaughter-free” meat or any of the other descriptors floating around nowadays. Just regular ol’ meat from regular ol’ animals.

It’s significant, then, that Eat Just’s deal with Madame Fan will deliver cultivated meat that actually replaces its conventional counterpart on the menu. In future, says Tetrick, restaurant menus will still offer some plant-based options (for those who can’t eat animals for ethical and/or religious reasons). But in his mind, “it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have both cultivated meat and conventional meat on the menu.”

“I think you’ll end up having restaurants all across the world transition,” he added.

Not tomorrow, mind you. As I write this, global demand for meat is up. There is also a huge difference between letting someone taste something as a one-off experience and getting them to order it on a regular basis. As more companies attempt to scale up — often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — they will need to start educating their prospective consumers on what the heck this stuff is and why we need it in the first place. Choosing the right restaurant partners and getting the actual chefs involved will be important for this, too, as well sending the right messaging to each different demographic.

Food delivery may be one small step in this process, but given its ubiquity right now, it’s a crucial one to get right.

Elsewhere in the Restaurant Biz . . .

Top Three Takeaways from Our Food Robotics Summit – The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht gives some thought to the future of robots, including restaurant robots, in his wrap-up from our latest event.

Take on Big Pizza by Supporting Bitcoin – An investor/entrepreneur has launched Bitcoin Pizza, a pop-up restaurant brand that will partner with independent pizza shops to deliver pies from May 22–29. Proceeds in part go towards supporting independent restaurants.

On-Demand Pay App DailyPay Raises $500M in Capital – The on-demand payment service for restaurants and retailers has secured $500 million in capital and will use it to expand to new markets.

Instacart Expands 7-Eleven Delivery Nationwide

Instacart announced today that it is expanding its delivery partnership with 7-Eleven across the U.S. Instacart will now deliver food, household items, alcohol, snacks and more from roughly 6,000 7-Eleven stores across 33 states and Washington, D.C. in as little as 30 minutes.

Customers looking to get items delivered from the famed convenience store chain can visit www.instacart.com/711 or by opening the Instacart mobile app.

Instacart first partnered with 7-Eleven back in September of 2020, starting with 750 stores across a limited number of southeastern states. It was the first convenience store partnership for Instacart, and the program has grown since, with today’s news marking an expansion of 4,000 new 7-Eleven locations to the service.

The convenience store category has certainly become more, well, convenient over the past year thanks to third-party delivery. In addition to Instacart, DoorDash ramped up its own c-store delivery ambitions last year launching delivery partnerships with 7-Eleven, Wawa, Casey’s General Store, and CircleK.

The pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing made home delivery table stakes for any food retailer. But the biggest competition for existing players like 7-Eleven and CircleK may not be other big c-store brands. Instead, it could come from the rising wave of new delivery-only conveniences stores. Gopuff recently raised $1.5 billion to scale up its dark convenience stores that deliver 24 hours a day. There are also new, small grocers like Fridge No More which are basically convenience stores, offering delivery in as little as fifteen minutes. Not to mention DoorDash building out its own chain of delivery-only DashMart stores.

The question these upstarts raise is whether getting the types of snacks and drinks and impulse items you find at convenience stores will become more like a utility. If fast delivery is available anytime, will people at home still stock up on items in one trip, or will they make multiple orders throughout the day to satiate their snacking whims? The answer may not be so convenient for existing c-stores. [I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN WITH THE LAST LINE.]

Burger King Launches a Ghost Kitchen Initiative in the UK

Burger King said over the weekend it is trialing its first-ever delivery-only restaurant, a location in London, UK that opened on Sunday. The burger chain said this new venture has the potential to reach over 400,000 customers in the North London area.

For its first delivery-only initiative, Burger King has partnered with FoodStars, the commissary kitchen company bought by Travis Kalnick’s CloudKitchens back in 2019. Customers will be able to order meals for delivery via third-party service Deliveroo. Service from Just Eat and Uber Eats will be available soon, too. 

The expansion to delivery-only service comes just as the UK is in the process of opening back up. From today (May 17), restaurants, cafes, pubs, and bars in England, Scotland, and Wales are finally allowed to serve customers inside, with certain restrictions around social distancing and the size of groups. But while consumers will no doubt flock back to restaurant dining rooms, food delivery is expected to remain a popular option for many. This is less about a fear of the dining room and more about new habits getting established during COVID-19-related lockdowns. Many consumers who had never before ordered delivery got comfortable with the concept during the last year or so, and will continue that behavior for the long term.

Burger King is one of many major QSR chains responding to this change. Chipotle announced its own ghost kitchen initiative in 2020, for example. And many chains are redesigning overall store designs to accommodate more off-premises formats. On its recent earnings call, Wendy’s said 30 percent of a planned 1,200 new locations will be “nontraditional units,” a label that includes delivery-only locations and ghost kitchens. Like Taco Bell and Burger King, the chain has introduced new store designs that feature little or no dining room space.

Burger King has not yet said if its ghost kitchen initiative will expand to other UK locations and eventually to other countries. Presumably, the chain will first test the success of this endeavor before announcing any new delivery-only locations.

Grubhub Debuts ‘Commission-Free’ Platform Aimed at Independent Restaurants

Grubhub on Wednesday launched Grubhub Direct, a platform independent restaurants can use to build their own online storefronts and process orders free of commission. According to a press release from Grubhub, the platform also gives restaurants control of their customer data. 

The launch comes after more than a year of heavy criticism of delivery services over the commission fees they charge restaurants. Though Grubhub and others have done this for years, the issue became a lot more hot-button in 2020 when the pandemic shut dining rooms down and forced businesses to rely on third-party delivery services. Many cities across the U.S. introduced mandatory fee caps to keep commission fees in check. 

Seemingly in response, third-party delivery services have, one after the other, launched various means of addressing the restaurant commission fee issue. Uber Eats was first, in July of last year. DoorDash followed, with a “tiered commission” setup. 

Grubhub’s particular version is, the company indicated today, particularly geared towards independent restaurants — a group that’s historically paid the most in commission fees. Grubhub direct offers these restaurants the option to build a branded website, create loyalty programs and promotions, the ability to process and manage orders, and access customer names, email addresses, and order history.

Grubhub says there is no marketing commission on Grubhub Direct orders, and that it is waiving the one-time setup fee (normally $99) on the product until May 2022. 

Per the fine print, restaurants will pay Grubhub a $49/month non-refundable hosting fee for their website for each location. Restaurants must use a URL provided by Grubhub, and of course, since it’s a Grubhub platform, all the data still lives in the hands of the delivery service. Like any other third-party service, Grubhub will still charge a commission fee if the restaurant uses a Grubhub driver to handle the last mile. 

Direct also seems to be Grubhub’s way of competing with software platforms like those from Ontray, Lunchbox, and others. These services also let restaurants build their own digital storefronts and manage orders, and many already integrate with third-party delivery services for the last mile of delivery.

Grubhub, meanwhile, may be undergoing some big changes in the near future. Just Eat Takeaway.com, a Dutch delivery service that acquired Grubhub for $7 billion in 2020, recently published its prospectus for the merger. As it noted, Grubhub shareholders will meet to vote on the offer in June. 

DoorDash Now Delivering Groceries and Other Goods from Rite Aid

DoorDash today announced a partnership with drug store giant Rite Aid to offer same-day delivery for a wide range of home and food essential items. Delivery is available starting today through the DoorDash app from more than 2,100 Rite Aid locations across 17 states.

Customers will be able to order more than 24,000 items for delivery from Rite Aid, including health and beauty supplies, non-perishable and perishable groceries like milk and ice cream, as well as over-the-counter medicine. DoorDash says the average delivery time is less than an hour.

For Rite Aid, offering DoorDash as a delivery partner makes a lot of sense. Drug stores are where people pick up, well, the drugs they need to feel better when they are sick. Given the world’s new sensitivities to viruses and how they spread, it’s a good thing for sick people to stay at home and out of a store when they need Nyquill and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s to feel better.

DoorDash is also under pressure as competitors on multiple fronts ramp up their deliveries. Grocery retailers, like Walmart and Albertsons, which also offer over-the-counter medications and health and beauty items, have expanded their delivery options thanks to the pandemic. But a new category of delivery-only stores like goPuff are on the rise, offering 24-hour delivery of food and home essentials in as little as a half hour.

In fact, DoorDash operates its own growing chain of delivery-only convenience stores. One has to wonder how this new delivery data from Rite Aid could inform DoorDash’s decisions as it ramps up expansion of its own stores.

After Cold Email Pitch, Mark Cuban Invests in SAVRpak (Formerly Soggy Food Sucks)

Perhaps the old addage “It never hurts to ask” has never been more true than in the case of SAVRpak. The company announced today that it has closed a $3.5 million Series A round of funding led by famed investor Mark Cuban. How did Cuban get involved? SAVRpak’s co-founder and co-CEO Greg Maselli skipped the Shark Tank and sent Cuban a cold email directly.

We don’t know what magical combination of words Maselli used to sway Cuban (presumably it did not involve NFTs or Dogecoin), but SAVRpak is actually a pretty good pitch in and of itself. The company produces special patches made from paper and a plant-pup-based solution that are affixed inside food takeout containers. Using the principles of thermodynamics, the patches absorb moisture to keep delivery food crisp and fresh (no soggy fries). The patch does not use chemicals and will receive its biodegradable certification later this year. 

We hate to brag, but we knew SAVRpak was cool way before Cuban. The company used to be known as Soggy Food Sucks, and it won the Startup Showcase at our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. The company changed its name to SAVRpak in September of last year when it realized that family-friendly brands didn’t necessarily want to do business with any company with “Sucks” in their name.

When we spoke to SAVRpak last September, company co-founder, Bill Birgen said that COVID-19 had been a double-edged sword for his company. On the one hand, with restaurant dining rooms shut down, delivery and takeout were bigger than ever. But at the same time, restaurants hanging on by a thread were reluctant to add another item to their expense sheet.

In September, SAVRpak was producing 1 million units per month and had plans to scale production up to 15 million units per month by the end of the year. With this new funding, SAVRpak said it will expand production capacity by up to 50 million units a month, and advance applications in the agriculture, grocery, and consumer markets.

It was actually a Mark Cuban-heavy weekend for Spoon-related companies. In addition to SAVRpak, home beer brewing appliance startup, BEERMKR, appeared on Shark Tank last Friday. But while the cold email from SAVRpak resulted in an investment from Cuban, BEERMKR’s pitch got the cold shoulder from Cuban (though to be fair, BEERMKR taped that episode back in September, before the wider shipments of its devices).

Delivery Hero’s Tackling a Major Hurdle to More Diversity in Tech

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

When Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero launched its recent Tech Academy recently, it showed us one way to create both more and better jobs in the restaurant industry — and make those available to a wider swath of the population. The question is, Will the Delivery Hero Tech Academy be successful enough to influence others in the increasingly tech-centric restaurant industry?

The Tech Academy will teach tech skills to “underrepresented groups” to promote more diversity and inclusion, and also give people more options when it comes to finding a job. To do this, Delivery Hero teamed up with the Digital Career Institute (DCI). Founded in 2016 in Berlin, DCI was originally launched as a way to help refugees get jobs in the tech world. (This was in the wake of the record 1.3 million asylum seekers that came to Europe in 2015.) The organization now operates four locations across Germany and works with over 600 companies to link DCI graduates to job opportunities. 

The Delivery Hero Tech Academy will teach coding languages (Java and Python are specifically called out), and the 9.5-months-long program is free to all participants. Those participants may also get an opportunity to move into a permanent position on a backend development team at Delivery Hero following the program. While that’s not a complete guarantee, participants presumably won’t be left out in the cold after graduation, either. DCI’s large network of partner companies will no doubt provide other potential opportunities.

A lack of diversity has long been a major problem in tech. Companies and leaders have made efforts in the form of diversity reports and pledges to do more, but critics have said these efforts will “ring hollow” until changes show up in diversity data.

At the same time, the restaurant industry is getting increasingly digitized thanks to the shift towards to-go orders (e.g., delivery) and digital ordering, payment, and management platforms. Theoretically, the switch could create not just more jobs in the industry but jobs that pay higher, are less dangerous, offer the kinds of challenges that make work fulfilling, and lead to new career opportunities down the line.

For many around the world, the above litany remains firmly out of reach. In fact, it’s more common for refugees, undocumented workers, and those with less formal education to wind up working the last mile of delivery. And if there’s one job type that’s the antithesis of safe, fulfilling work that pays well, it’s gig worker jobs like food delivery.

Restaurant tech companies have been saying for a couple years now that they don’t want their AI, automation, and robotic platforms to displace workers. Rather, they want that tech to take over the dirty, dangerous, and boring pieces of the restaurant so that human workers can focus on the proverbial “more meaningful” tasks. So far, few have defined what “meaningful” is in this technocentric restaurant world, or how one manages to acquire the skills to get there.

Until now, that is. By helping to provide he education needed to get into the tech part of restaurant tech, Delivery Hero is addressing an area that’s until now not really been talked about. Let’s hope the Tech Academy can start to change that, and inspire other restaurant tech companies to do the same.

More Headlines

Too Good To Go Expands Its Food Waste App Nationally Across the U.S.: The company announced its plans to expand service for its food-waste-fighting platform across the United States, following a successful program in select East Coast states.

Foodetective Raises $2M in Seed Funding: Switzerland-based Foodetective raised funds for its B2B software, which is an operations platform restaurants can use to organize and run their many disparate pieces of software and view them from a single dashboard.

Over Half of U.S. Consumers Are Comfortable Dining in Restaurants: More than half of U.S. consumers (60 percent), are comfortable with the idea of dining out at a restaurant, according to new data from tech intelligence firm Morning Consult. 

Delivery Hero’s Tech Academy Will Promote Diversity by Teaching Coding

As of today, Delivery Hero is taking applications to its newly launched Delivery Hero Tech Academy, which aims to promote more diversity and inclusion in the tech industry through education.   

Done in partnership with the Digital Career Institute (DCI), the program will teach coding languages (Java and Python are specifically called out) to “anyone who would like to learn how to code.” While anyone may apply, Delivery Hero specifically encourages “underrepresented groups” to apply.

The program itself will take place in Berlin and last 9.5 months. Seven of those months will be spent on curriculum, while the final stretch takes the form of an internship with one of Delivery Hero’s backend tech teams. Students may get the opportunity for a permanent position at Delivery Hero following the program (though it is not a guarantee).

For now, the program is open to those based in Berlin. Since Delivery Hero is funding the entire thing, those selected to participate pay nothing. 

There’s a growing need for opportunities that teach tech skills to wider swaths of the population. The robots may not have eaten up all the jobs yet, but automation is increasingly changing the nature of work, especially in the wake of the havoc brought by the Covid-19. Some estimates from economists have found that 42 percent of the jobs lost during the pandemic are gone forever, partly because companies are replacing humans with technology to keep costs lower. 

In the food delivery industry, specifically, we’ve long wondered when robots would take over the work of couriers and drivers, and to some degree that is already happening with autonomous delivery vehicles and the digitization of the restaurant back of house.

Delivery Hero’s Tech Academy offers one potential solution to these problems by providing individuals with new skillsets. Instead of these people getting elbowed out by tech, they are instead invited to participate in the inevitable changes facing the food delivery industry. 

The application period for the Delivery Hero Tech Academy runs from now until July 15.

 

Walgreens Launches Two-Hour Delivery

Drug store giant Walgreens is getting in on the speedy delivery game, as the company announced today that it now offers nationwide two-hour delivery of more than 24,000 products.

According to a press announcement, customers can shop via Walgreens’ website or app as the normally would. There is no minimum order required and upon checkout, shoppers select Same Day Delivery and can receive their items in under two hours.

Walgreens has existing delivery relationships with third-party services like Postmates, DoorDash and Instacart. But in those cases, customers ordered via the third-party platforms, not Walgreens. Though this new service has customers using the Walgreens site and app, a Walgreens rep told us that the actual delivery of items is still being facilitated third-party delivery companies like Uber and DoorDash. This new arrangement, however, would allow Walgreens to keep more of its customer data, rather than hand it off entirely to a delivery company.

That Walgreens is launching its own fast, two-hour delivery option isn’t that much of a surprise. The lines between grocery retailer, drug store and convenience store continue to blur as shoppers can buy a variety of foods, medicines, beverages and beauty items at any of those options. As such, Walgreens is being squeezed by grocery giants like Amazon and its two-hour delivery on one end, and upstarts like the delivery-only convenience store goPuff, which offers delivery of items in as little as a half hour, 24 hours a day.

Another benefit of Walgreens ramping up its delivery efforts is that hopefully fewer sick people will go into stores. Walgreens delivery is contactless, which means people with colds and flus won’t have to wander store aisles, stand in line with other healthy customers or interact with human cashiers. A definite benefit in this pandemic age.

Food Delivery Service Zomato Files to Go Public

Zomato, one of India’s leading and largest food delivery startups, announced today it has filed for an IPO from which it plans to raise $1.1 billion. 

To date, the 12-year-old company has raised $2.1 billion in total from the likes of Kora Investments, Tiger Global, and Ant Group, among other investors. Once public, it plans to list on the Indian Stock Exchange as NSE and BSE.

The company said it plans to invest 75 percent of its IPO proceedings into further building out its Zomato Pro subscription program as well as its business-to-business supply operation called Hyperpure.

Like most other restaurant-related companies, Zomato saw its fair share of ups and downs in 2020, including having to make cuts to its workforce about a year ago. However, the company has largely recovered from that, though its paperwork notes that the COVID-19 pandemic “has had and could impact our business, cash flows, financial condition and results of operators.” 

According to its filing documents, Zomato has more than 350,000 active restaurant listings on its platform across 24 different markets. The company says it faces “intense competition,” citing Prosus-backed food delivery service Swiggy as its competition along with cloud kitchen operator Rebel Foods and restaurant chains like Domino’s and McDonald’s. Amazon entered the Indian food delivery market last year but is not named as a competitor in Zomato’s filing. Uber Eats, meanwhile, sold its India business to Zomato in March of 2020 for $206 million.

Earlier this month, chief rival Swiggy raised a whopping $800 million and is now valued at $5 billion. As yet, Swiggy has made no announcements around a potential IPO.