Today Zomato launched its restaurant discovery service in Cape Town, a crucial step to expand and gain better reach in South Africa for a company which is one of the few catering to this market.
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Zomato’s award-winning app is location-aware and suggests the best restaurants near a user’s physical location. The service integrates social features for a rich and credible content base. Users can choose specific networks or friends to follow and get restaurant recommendations from them.
One of the company’s main strengths is the thorough information the Zomato app provides. Users have access to scanned menus, reviews, photos and mapped coordinates. It’s available for free on BlackBerry, Android, iOS and Windows 8.
Zomato attracts more than 14-million users per month and since its initial launch in South Africa in April this year, the website has reached the top 500 most viewed sites in the country.
“In addition to the large number of users we see visiting Zomato, restaurant owners also see the value that Zomato adds to their business, and we’re expecting this trend to continue in Cape Town as well,” says Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO.
Headquartered in India, Zomato has expanded to over eight countries including the United Arab Emirates, UK, the Philippines, Qatar, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and South Africa. Goyal said that the company has “been expanding [its] geographical footprint aggressively over the past few months, and South Africa is an important market for [Zomato].”
Goyal said that “the response from Johannesburg has been overwhelming” and hopes for continued support and success in Cape Town. Including over 1300 of Cape Town’s restaurants, the startup notes the importance of having a relationship with both its users and represented restaurants.
It’s facing off against competitors like Table Magic and ComeDine, but the market’s still open-game as there isn’t a Yelp-like monopoly in Africa as yet.
