Is this going to be the multi-billion-dollar Indian company that conquers the globe? The app company that becomes the eating out guide — and more — to would-be diners is just about everywhere.

It might seem far-fetched today. But looking at the speed with which Zomato is racing around the world gobbling up restaurant guide websites and others, becoming a global leader in its domain doesn’t seem such a distant dream.

Gurgaon-based Zomato has acquired a total of nine companies, big and small, from around the world, in the past 10 months alone. The largest of these was Urbanspoon for $52 million marking its entry into the US, Australia and Canada. Before that Zomato had acquired dominant local restaurant search players in countries as widespread as Poland, Italy, New Zealand, Turkey and the Czech Republic.

The latest feather in its cap is US-based online table reservation platform NexTable. Although the company isn’t saying how much it paid, the map for the future is ready. “Over the next six to nine months, we will focus on consolidating our presence in existing markets as well as building a strong integrated product,” says Deepinder
Goyal, founder and CEO.

Zomato’s amassed an awesome knowledge bank. It has a database of about one million restaurants across 22 countries. Besides in-depth information including scanned menus and photos, customers can look for a dining experience that fits their pocket or choose a good home delivery. They can also rate or review restaurants on the website or through an app.

During Zomato’s early days, Goyal used to spend much of his time doing nitty-gritty, backroom work like scanning menus. Today, he roams the world to explore and cut multi-million dollar deals. In the last few months alone, he has been in Prague in the Czech Republic, then in the US and later in Turkey. Goyal acquired online food sites Urbanspoon in the US and Mekanist in Turkey earlier this year.

It hasn’t been an easy transition from working in a multinational company to starting an online business. But Goyal started thinking out-of- the-box even when he was in his mid-20s and working at Bain & Company, the international management consultant company.

Goyal, 32, and his colleague Pankaj Chaddah, 29, noticed their colleagues at Bain queuing up in the cafeteria every day to go through a stack of restaurant menu cards to order lunch. “One couldn’t take menus to the desks because they would get lost. One day, I decided to scan these menus and put them on the office intranet. Soon a lot of people started using the service,” Goyal recalls.

From that very ordinary act, a grand idea that would change the way people chose restaurants to dine at took shape. Goyal and Chaddah quit their jobs at Bain in 2008 and raised small amounts of money from family and friends.

And one summer morning in June 2008 Zomato started its operations from Goyal’s cramped living room in Gurgaon. The team was made up of four people including Goyal.

In barely six years, the company is all about big numbers and tie-ups it is sewing round the globe. According to reports, Zomato is already valued at around $1 billion. And it’s moving forwards in leaps and bounds.

Last year, Zomato was ranked third by Deloitte Tech Fast 50 India for growing its revenues 1,399 per cent between 2012 and 2014. The Deloitte Tech Fast 50 India, as its name suggests, ranks the fastest growing Indian tech companies.

And don’t underestimate Zomato’s ambitions. It is looking beyond just being a restaurant guide. So, in April, it acquired MaplePOS, a cloud-based point of sale product for restaurants that offers features such as menu and inventory management, and can also accept debit and credit card payments.

Zomato has also tied up with Uber, enabling restaurant-goers to book cabs while going out for a meal. “Once a user has found a place to dine by using the Zomato app, a single tap on the Uber button on the restaurant page will allow one to find the nearest Uber,” says Goyal.

Such innovations and speed of growth means that finding new investors is not difficult. In fact, they are queuing up to pump millions into Zomato. So far, it has raised about $163 million from Info Edge, Sequoia Capital and VY Capital.

Zomato wasn’t the name Goyal and Chaddah had in mind when they decided to start a company. It was Foodiebay. “We decided to change our name from Foodiebay to Zomato for two reasons. One, we wanted to come up with a brand name which would be more diverse and wouldn’t restrict us only to food. Second, we wanted to create a brand that we could scale globally and wanted to avoid any confusion with ebay, the online shopping platform,” Goyal says.

In November 2010, Foodiebay.com became Zomato.com , just in time for a legal notice about domain names from ebay that arrived two weeks later to become irrelevant.

For first few months, Goyal was rushed off his feet just collecting, scanning and uploading menu cards of restaurants in Delhi and NCR. Then he turned his attention to the bigger picture, looking after strategy and product development.

Chaddah, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Zomato, oversees sales and operations and has been responsible for all mobile development and distribution across platforms.

Today, Zomato employs over 1,300 people  worldwide. More than 400 of them work at its  head office, which is a five-storey building in Sector 44, Gurgaon, where they moved in May 2014.

All this hasn’t been easy. As a wet-behind-the-ears entrepreneur, Goyal inevitably found it a big challenge to raise funds for his start-up. He hit lucky when he came into contact with venture capital company Info Edge (India), which believed in their dreams and was one of their first investors.

It helped that Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder of Info Edge, had first come across Zomato (then Foodiebay) as a user. He’d heard about it from his son who was an active user of the website. “He saw potential in our idea. He wrote to us to check if we were looking for an investor and we jumped at the opportunity,” Goyal says.

In August 2010, Bikhchandani called Goyal and Chaddah over to his office one evening and the following day, Zomato raised its first round of funds ($1 million) from Info Edge.

“I found him to be a very bright, focused and confident young man when I met him for the first time,” Bikhchandani recalls, though he admits he never imagined that Zomato would become “so big”. Over the years, Info Edge, which is India’s largest Internet classifieds company and the owner of Naukri.com, has increased its stake in Zomato to a majority 50.1 per cent now.

Goyal and his company are constantly on the lookout for new ideas and they’ve grabbed every idea that had to do with food. In early 2011, there was a lot of talk about ‘food porn’ as people began to photograph every dish that came before them on a restaurant table and share them on their social networks. Goyal realised that Zomato had thousands of unused photos in its archives. “We decided to get a .xxx domain and create a food porn site to showcase the most delicious food pictures that we had on Zomato,” Goyal says. Today, many Zomato users look up these pictures before deciding on where to eat.

This month, Zomato is going one big step further as its rolls out online home delivery in Delhi, with Mumbai and Bangalore to follow soon. With around 2,000 restaurant partners, Zomato will act as the technical platform, allowing users to select dishes and order their meal online. Payments and deliveries will be handled by restaurants.
This puts Zomato into direct competition with global online ordering player Foodpanda in India, but Goyal doesn’t sound worried about the tough competition. “We have a huge advantage because of our field intensive sales force and our database of restaurant information,” he says.

According to Zomato, 400,000 people in India use the app every day and it has three million global visitors.

A graduate from IIT-Delhi, Goyal was born and brought up in Muktsar, Punjab. He joined Bain in 2005 immediately after graduating. “I learnt the importance of investing time in people and making sure we have the right hires,” he says.

And, his family was his pillar of support. As for his wife Kanchan, he says: “She has been the big believer in Zomato.”

Although Goyal doesn’t eat out much, he enjoys trying out new places. “I love a good breakfast spread and look forward to Sunday brunches with my wife,” Goyal says. But he says that he does check out the ratings and recommended dishes at a restaurant before dining out.

Zomato’s dealings with its customers give it an insight into where people are dining and what they are ordering. Talking about dining trends in India, Goyal says: “If Delhi loves north Indian cuisine, Calcutta is a big fan of Chinese. We’ve seen an increase in demand for Thai, Japanese and Korean cuisines in Calcutta. Also, 85 per cent of users in Calcutta search for dining options in the cheap/affordable category.”

Interestingly, according to the Zomato chief, Calcuttans prefer to eat out rather than drink out.

Some restaurants with high ratings and good reviews on Zomato include Monkey Bar, Vasant Kunj, SodaBottleOpenerWala, Gurgaon, both in Delhi NCR, and Café Mezzuna in Calcutta.

An avid book collector, Goyal loves buying classics. He has just finished reading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. “I quite liked the first half of it. Another good book that I read is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I highly recommend it to people in core teams at start-ups.”

Goyal says that over the years he has become  more disciplined about his time. “I work Monday to Saturday and on Sundays I try to switch-off and spend time with family and friends,” he says.

An early riser, Goyal starts his day at 7am. After regular workouts and swimming, he likes to spend quality time with his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Siara. “It’s the only time in the day, I get to see her active,” Goyal smiles.

But Zomato is clearly on steroids and growth hormones. The company is looking at creating 2,500 jobs this financial year. “We look for people who are excited by our vision and who have the fire in their belly to get things done,” Goyal says. And that isn’t surprising, coming as it does from a man with the world on his plate.