Recently, The Brand Global team has reported that Zomato and Grofers would be delivering essential items in a partnership during the national lockdown. Our team also notified that the online companies are hiring thousands of people to cater to the spike in demand amid lockdown.
The ET has reported now that the food delivery platform Zomato is in talks to buy the Softbank backed online grocery startup, Grofers.
The merger between the two entities will be a significant consolidation move in India’s consumer internet sector. The all-stock deal is expected to close at approximately $750M.
The merger between Zomato & Grofers will be a significant consolidation move in India’s consumer internet sector.
SoftBank, the Japanese Vision Fund, which has the largest stake in Grofers, may further invest around $100-200 million in the merged entity.
Uber, in which SoftBank has invested considerable amount had in February, sold its India food delivery business UberEats to Zomato.
In just a few months, this would be another significant acquisition by Zomato after Uber eats
In January this year, Zomato announced that it had secured $150M in fresh funding from Ant Financial, which is a subsidiary of Chinese firm Alibaba.
Zomato is currently valued at around $3.2 billion, while Grofers was at $650M in December 2019.
Zomato – Indian restaurant aggregator and food delivery startup
Founders – Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddah
Founding Year – 2008
Location – DLF Phase V, Gurugram, India
Website – https://www.zomato.com/ncr
Grofers – Indian online grocery delivery service
Founders – Albinder Dhindsa, Saurabh Kumar
Founding Year – 2013
Location – Gurugram
Website – https://grofers.com/
In the Indian Online Grocery segment, the merged entity is going to give a fierce competition to BigBasket, which is one of the most prominent players in this segment. BigBasket had earlier explored the possibility of a potential merger with Grofers, but the talks failed. Even Amazon held some rounds of negotiations with BigBasket, but that could not materialize.
