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Better food for more people
In 2008, two young consultants at Bain & Company in Delhi noticed something surprisingly ordinary: every lunchtime, employees were wasting time standing in queues just to look at restaurant menus.
Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah saw an opportunity where everyone else saw an inconvenience.
They began scanning restaurant menus and putting them online so their colleagues could browse them before deciding where to eat. What started as a small internal solution soon attracted attention beyond Bain.
That experiment became Foodiebay.
And eventually, it became Zomato.
Goyal has described the company's early days as almost accidental. He and Pankaj were not initially trying to build a giant technology company. They were simply building something they themselves wanted to use.
By July 2008, the two had decided to build Foodiebay together. The website began growing, and within a couple of years it had thousands of restaurant listings.
In 2010, after receiving funding from Info Edge, the founders decided the business needed a broader identity. “Foodiebay” sounded too restrictive—and its resemblance to eBay created another concern.
So they renamed it Zomato.
The new name represented a bigger ambition: Zomato didn't want merely to publish menus. It wanted to help people answer a much larger question:
“Where should I go today?”
Zomato then moved aggressively.
Instead of remaining an Indian restaurant directory, it expanded internationally and acquired local restaurant-discovery businesses across several countries.
One of its biggest moves came in 2015, when Zomato acquired U.S.-based restaurant discovery platform Urbanspoon for roughly $50–60 million. At the time, Zomato was operating across more than 20 countries and had built a substantial international footprint.
But international expansion was expensive.
And another company had begun changing the rules of the game.
Restaurant discovery brought users to Zomato. But companies such as Swiggy and Foodpanda were building businesses around something more valuable: the actual transaction.
Food discovery was becoming food delivery.
Zomato entered India's online food-delivery market in 2015, putting itself directly into a fierce competition for customers, restaurants and delivery partners.
The company also acquired Runnr, strengthening its delivery capabilities.
Then came one of its most consequential deals.
In January 2020, Zomato acquired Uber Eats India in an all-stock transaction. Uber received a 9.99% stake in Zomato, while Uber Eats' Indian customers and restaurant partners moved onto Zomato.
Zomato later reported that it retained 97% of the combined GMV during the transition.
The same year, however, COVID-19 delivered another shock: Zomato's food-delivery GMV fell about 80% in the last week of March 2020 compared with its pre-COVID peak.
The company had survived another test.
In July 2021, Zomato went public.
Its IPO raised ₹9,375 crore and was subscribed 38.25 times by the end of the offering.
For India's startup ecosystem, the listing was significant: a consumer internet company built around restaurants, delivery and technology had entered the public markets at enormous scale.
But going public didn't mean the journey was over.
It meant the company now had to prove that growth could eventually become a sustainable business.
In 2022, Zomato acquired quick-commerce company Blinkit, formerly Grofers.
That acquisition represented another major shift. Zomato was no longer thinking only about restaurants and food delivery. It was moving toward a broader infrastructure of everyday consumption.
Then came the biggest symbolic change.
In 2025, Zomato Limited proposed—and subsequently became—Eternal Limited. The Zomato brand itself remained, but the parent company expanded into four major businesses:
Zomato — food delivery and dining
Blinkit — quick commerce
Hyperpure — restaurant supply chain
District — going-out, entertainment and experiences
Deepinder Goyal explained the philosophy behind the transformation: “Zomato is an accidental company.” The company, he said, had begun with a simple desire to be useful and had gradually evolved into something much larger.
By FY26, Eternal reported ₹429 crore in consolidated adjusted EBITDA for Q4, while 109 million Indians had completed transactions worth more than $10 billion through Blinkit, District and Zomato during the year.
Zomato's journey is ultimately a story about aggregation.
First, it aggregated restaurant information.
Then, it aggregated food orders and delivery.
Then, through Blinkit, it began aggregating local inventory and instant commerce.
And under Eternal, the ambition became even broader: build an ecosystem around how people eat, shop and go out.
What began with a few scanned menus on an office computer had become something far bigger than a food-delivery company.
