Zomato enters New Zealand, adds new cities and introduces more social features on site

Headquartered in New Delhi, India, Zomato is a consumer web company that provides users a way to discover new places to eat and drink. Zomato has raised four rounds of funding worth INR 86 crores from InfoEdge till date and is present in 8 countries now with the addition of New Zealand which the company announced today.

More than 5 years old now, Zomato started expanding its spectrum and launched internationally about a year ago. Now Zomato provides in-depth information such as scanned menus, mapped coordinates, contact details, pictures, and user ratings and reviews for over 103,000 restaurants worldwide.

Talking more about international operations, co-founder Deepinder Goyal said,

Along with working on the product, we have been focusing on expanding our geographical footprint aggressively within our current markets as well as into new markets over the past few months. The United Kingdom and South Africa sections of the website have both seen an overwhelming response, with users demanding to see us in other cities within these countries. New Zealand has been on the cards for a while as it is an excellent market for a product like ours and we are looking forward to a positive response from both Auckland and Wellington. We are also looking at expanding into Australia over the next few months, in addition to Turkey and Indonesia.

Apart from this, the Zomato site has also undergone a major update and added a few more features as well:

• Advanced review spam detection and approved reviewers (new reviewers on Zomato will have to at least publish 10 reviews and get their profiles approved from Zomato moderators before their reviews become publicly visible)
• User moderation of reviews -- Super Foodies and Connoisseurs will now be able to report a review as suspicious or fake
• Ability to upload pictures to restaurants as another form of user generated content in addition to reviews
• Public comments on reviews -- users will be able to comment and ask follow-up questions on reviews
• Messaging -- foodies will be able to get in touch with each other and plan meetups by messaging each other on Zomato
• Reformatted and more relevant search results -- de-cluttered search listings by clubbing fast food chains into a single result
• Redesigned interface making the website easier to use

Website: Zomato