Zomato bolsters its ship with UberEats as Indian food-tech scouts a shore

In a tough environment, Zomato's expensive purchase shows how its strategy is different from Swiggy's as both compete to attract Softbank amid global investors' proxy food wars in India

India’s food delivery market was churning in 2018. Zomato, battling leadership attrition as it sought investors, got a shock when Swiggy, a much newer company, announced a $1-billion raise in December. That was more money than Zomato had raised in the nine years of its existence and it was led by Prosus Ventures, one of the world’s most bullish investors in food-tech.
 
Swiggy’s formidable war chest put pressure on Zomato to scale up its own—if it were to survive in a market that relied on heavy discounts and where companies funded delivery fees from their own pockets.
 
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