Fresh from that massive UrbanSpoon acquisition and continuing its ongoing, aggressive acquisition spree, Restaurant discovery app Zomato has now acquired Turkey based Mekanist, to almost double its presence in the country.
Mekanist is one of Turkey’s largest restaurant discovery and review websites. Founded in 2008 with the purpose of offering users an opportunity to discover and enjoy local establishments in their cities, the app gives its users an ability of reviewing establishments and reading other users’ reviews. Mekanist also gives establishments a platform to effectively promote themselves to a targeted audience and opens a means of dialogue with existing and potential customers.
The Turkish app claims to have over 190,000 listed establishments along with over 500,000 reviews from its 1.5 million strong signed-up user base on web and mobile.
Similar to its UrbanSpoon deal, this deal too will see all of Mekanit’s traffic and restaurant-related content move to Zomato, and Mekanist app users redirected to use the Zomato app. The deal will help local restaurant businesses to benefit from Zomato’s hyperlocal advertising model, and target customers searching for restaurants in and around their location.
This new acquisition will see Zomato increasing its restaurant coverage about 27,500 restaurants in Istanbul and Ankara now, to more than 50,000 restaurants across the whole of Turkey
This is Zomato’s seventh acquisition in the past six months. Interstingly, the company also confirmed that it spent $52m to acquire UrbanSpoon to enter the US and Australia markets only a couple of weeks ago. Zomato has also recently acquired local dominant restaurant search players in New Zealand, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Italy.
Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato, said,
We’re excited to be joining forces with them as we continue to grow in one of our most important markets. Mekanist is one of the first and most successful tech startups to emerge from the Turkish startup ecosystem, and we’re excited about them becoming a part of Zomato.
Financials related to the deal haven’t been disclosed by either party. We’ve contacted Zomato for the same and will update the story once we receive a statement.
