Restaurant reservation startup EazyDiner Pvt. Ltd, founded by media personality Vir Sanghvi and a group of hoteliers and restaurateurs, has raised Rs 30 crore ($4.6 million) in Series B funding from new and existing investors, a top company executive told VCCircle.
The existing backers included DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital. Singapore-based early-stage venture capital firm Beenext and an undisclosed family office from the Middle East came on board as new investors.
In an e-mailed response, Eazydiner co-founder Rohit Dasgupta told VCCircle that the new round of funding will be primarily used for expansion into new international markets and enhancing the technology platform.
The new round puts the pre-money valuation of the company at Rs 250 crore, an increase of nearly three-and-a-half times from the Series A valuation of Rs 75 crore, he added.
In June, cricketer Yuvraj’s Singh’s investment firm YouWeCan had invested an undisclosed sum in the venture. Singh was also roped in as the startup’s brand ambassador as part of the transaction, media reports stated at the time.
In August 2015, EazyDiner had raised $3 million (Rs 20 crore then) from DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital. In April 2015, it had raised $1 million in seed funding from DSG Consumer Partners and Gulpreet Kohli, former managing director of ChrysCapital.
Besides Dasgupta, Pabreja and Sanghvi, EazyDiner’s other co-founders are Shruti Kaul and Ruchika Dhamija.
The online platform, founded in late 2014, offers services including restaurant discovery, reviews, deals, table bookings and concierge services. According to information on its website, customers can book more than 2,500 restaurants on the platform.
“We are today seating over 1,00,000 diners every month all across India making us the largest instant table reservation platform in India,†Dasgupta said. He claimed that the company’s proprietary product, LiveTable, confirms a table reservation within 18 seconds.
The Delhi-based three-year-old startup is operational in nine cities, including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Goa and Ahmedabad, and hopes to expand to six more locations by the end of the current financial year.
“Our next ports of call would be Jaipur, Hyderabad, Agra, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Kochi and Chandigarh. We expect our Indian presence to go up to 15 cities by March 2018. International moves will happen in Q3 or Q4 of 2018-19,†Dasgupta said.
A few ventures in the broader food-tech space have raised funding recently. In August, Russia-based Chernovetskyi Investment Group invested an undisclosed sum in Gurgaon-based food-tech startup Innerchef, media reports stated.
In August, Monkeybox, which delivers food to school children in Bangalore, raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A round from existing investor Blume Ventures. In September, media reports said that food ordering and restaurant discovery platform Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd was in talks with Ant Financial Services Group to raise $100-200 million.
*This article has been updated to include comments from an EazyDiner co-founder.
*Two co-founders Sue Reitz and Manish Kutula have left the firm. The article has been updated to reflect this change.