Zomato, the aggressively expanding India-based online restaurant discovery platform has today announced, hat it has acquired Maplepos, a cloud-based Point of Sale product for restaurants. As an immediate result of the acquisition, the product has been renamed to ZomatoBase.
Maple POS (now Zomato Base) is a functional Android-based POS system that uses custom hardware for a more reliable and customisable product experience. It offers restaurants features such as menu and inventory management, and has a built-in payment solution to accept debit and credit card payments.
With this acquisition, Zomato moves a step forward in providing business-focused solutions for restaurants, which in turn, will help the company offer highly differentiated services to the end consumer. This quite rightly, also points towards the possibility of the launch of a delivery service, wherein Zomato would possibly equip its partner restaurants and cafes with ZomatoBase.
The detailed list of features in Maple POS Zomato Base include Menu Management, Inventory Management, Recipe Management, Customer Relationship Management, Data Analytics, Electronic Receipts, Offline Transaction Support, Payment Gateway Integration and a stealth feature which Zomato claims will change the way restaurants go about their business. Forever.
MapleGraph, the company that developed MaplePOS was founded in 2011 by Arun Tangri, Varun Tangri, and Abhishek Rohilla.
Talking about the acquisition, Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato, says,
There is a lot that can be done if we are able to build a technology platform that connects consumers to restaurants and vice versa, and we believe that a world-class cloud-based POS system is the first step towards building that platform. MaplePOS is a great point-of-sale product, and we are excited about the prospect of working with the MaplePOS team to build this further.
While Zomato’s rival-acquisition spree isn’t unknown to any, this will be Zomato’s first product acquisition. Since July 2014, Zomato has shopped seven companies in various parts of the world to extend its reach in the restaurant search space. This includes the super-expensive Urbanspoon, which gave Zomato a dominant position in Australia, Canada, and the United States.
In September 2014, Zomato launched Zomato for Business, an app that allows restaurant owners to update their menus, pictures, details, and special offers in real time. In February, Zomato launched its Cashless product in Dubai, and the company’s online ordering product is scheduled to be launched in India later this month. Zomato has been focusing on creating a seamless in-app experience for its consumers as well as for restaurant owners, which will allow the company to build on top of its core restaurant search offering.
