The battle for supremacy in the food delivery platform in India is going to get stiffer as Zomato has secured a fresh funding of $210 million from Alibaba's payment affiliate Ant Financial.
The company plans to take its rival Swiggy head on to have a larger chunk of the pie in the Indian food delivery marketplace. In a stock filing on Friday, Info Edge submitted that its stakes in Zomato will decrease from 30.91% to 27.68% after the latest fund infusion from Alipay Singapore Holding Pte. Ltd or other affiliates of Ant Financial.
The filing said that "We would like to bring to your knowledge that Zomato has signed a definitive agreement to undertake a primary fundraise of approximately USD 210 million from Alipay Singapore."
The Economic Times reports that if the estimates are to be believed, the investment will more than 10 percent stake which will take the valuation of Zomato to approximately $2 billion. Earlier this year, the food delivery platform had raised $150 million from Ant Financial, which was valued at $1.1 billion.
Last month, as a part of the investment round, Ant financials secured the right to become the largest stakeholder in one of India's biggest food delivery platform, Zomato. The fresh investment is expected to make Ant Financial the largest shareholder, or close to Info Edge's 27.68 percent stake post-dilution. Before the current round of investment, it held around 20-22 percent stake in Zomato.
The search for future investment in Zomato is likely to continue as its rival Swiggy is under discussion to secure $500-700 million from Alibaba rival and WeChat application owner Tencent besides existing backer Naspers at a valuation of $2.5-3 billion.
Zomato is aggressively looking for the investors as last month it held talks with China's online travel agency Ctrip for an approximate $400 million in the company. Besides that Zomato as well as Swiggy held discussions with Japanese Softbank Vision Fund.
Zomato claimed to have received 21 million monthly order run rate in its operations based out of India in the month of September. It also witnessed the highest daily order volume during last month at 7,00,000 orders each day of the week.
