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Zomato has acquired NexTable, an online table reservation platform based in Charlotte, North Carolina, US.
The NexTable deal makes for nine acquisitions in nine months for Zomato. The largest was Urbanspoon, acquired for $52 million — this marked Zomato’s entry into the US, Australia, and Canada.
NexTable is to soon be renamed Zomato Book. This comes after Zomato’s acquisition of cloud-based restaurant product MaplePOS.
NexTable enables customers to make restaurant reservations online, and includes table management and marketing tools for restaurants. Zomato has has been working on moving beyond restaurant search and discovery, into table reservations, online ordering, and in-app cashless payments. Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder and operations head at Zomato, said: “We want to own the communication layer between the restaurant businesses and customers. NexTable will add to this layer by bringing in the convenience of easy, online reservations for thousands of restaurants to our millions of users.”
Zomato recently acquired dominant local restaurant search firms in New Zealand, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkey, and Italy.
TC DeSilva, founder and chief executive of NexTable, said: “For any new table reservations product, no matter how good, it's hard to get businesses to adopt the product at scale for two reasons.”
First, it is hard to scale a sales team without massive funding. Second, it is hard to sell the product if you don't have a significant consumer presence. Zomato solves both for us, and we are excited to partner them to realise the true potential of what we have built.”
