<div><em>Zomato has tied up for Whitelabel Apps with about 100 restaurant brands, reports <strong>Mala Bhargava</strong></em></div><div> </div><div>If Zomato is the one app you head straight to when trying to settle on a good place to eat, it's about to be the go-to service for ordering from restaurants in your city. Already dabbling in food delivery, Zomato has just launched a platform, Whitelabel, which will offer a full suite of technologies for restaurants to run their business on the internet.</div><div> </div><div>What the Whitelabel platform is intended for is to launch custom-branded native mobile apps as a bridge between restaurants and customers. With this, restaurants will be able to scale their internet operations, booking tables, creating offers, delivering food to customers wherever they demand it.</div><div> </div><div>The food-tech segment has seen a lot of action over the last year. According to a Tracxn report published in December 2014, this segment has seen a total investment of $1.2 billion in 2014 alone. While the dine-out and online ordering segments have seen a large chunk of this funding, internet-first restaurants have also seen their fair share of interest from investors.</div><div> </div><div>Currently, most of the internet-first restaurants primarily function on a 'no/own kitchen + own delivery + on-demand' model. The industry is seeing early signs of this concept germinating in certain urban clusters. However, a vast majority of the industry is dominated by the unorganised sector of asset-heavy restaurants, and there is a huge untapped opportunity to get them online, build innovative services, and drive more delight to customers.</div><div> </div><div>Zomato's introduction of Whitelabel Apps aims to capture this opportunity. It is a plug-and-play platform which will power a restaurant's digital identity enabling restaurants to spend more time focusing on their core business of food, translating directly to better dining experiences for users.</div><div> </div><div>Ashish Goel, Chief of Product & Design, Zomato said "While speaking with a lot of restaurant owners, we realised that most of them do not have an app or digital presence and they want to harness the power and distribution of the internet and mobile to grow their business. And that there is no one single service provider for restaurants which can give them the entire suite of technologies required to run an internet presence closely integrated with the operations of their business. We see this as an opportunity to have a larger impact on the food-tech ecosystem, as well as create a larger overlap between tech and food."</div><div> </div><div>Today, for the majority of restaurants, there's a website where customers log in and look around and then order something on the phone. What Zomato will do is to use the same basic skeleton to create custom apps for any restaurant and offer increasing number of features to the client restaurant. This includes targeted push notifications, real-time information and menu management, and marketing tools. The app is based on a subscription model that bundles Zomato's existing restaurant management app - Zomato For Business - into each subscription for free. These Whitelabel apps integrate with all the ancillary services Zomato offers, such as Online Ordering, Table Reservations, in-app cashless payments, loyalty programs and the upcoming Zomato Base (point of sales system).</div><div> </div><div>Zomato has already tied up for Whitelabel Apps with about 100 restaurant brands including Summerhouse Cafe in New Delhi, Miyabi Sushi in Dubai, and Shizuku Ramen in Melbourne.</div><div> </div><div>The Zomato Whitelabel Platform will be available to restaurants in all 22 countries Zomato is present in currently. Zomato also announced that it has raised $60 million in a fresh round of funding that is being led by Singapore investment company, Temasek with participation from existing investor Vy Capital and will use the investment to further grow its new business verticals. This takes Zomato's total funding to $225 million - it comes from a close set of only four investors - Info Edge, Sequoia India, Vy Capital, and now Temasek. Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, said, "We will use this round to make investments in our new businesses such as online ordering, table reservations, point of sales, and our newly launched Whitelabel platform. With this round, and with some of our markets turning profitable recently, Zomato is well capitalised for at least two years. We are also stoked to have Temasek partner with us, and are looking forward to building one of the largest food-tech companies in the world."</div>
