Zomato elevates COO Gaurav Gupta to 'Co-founder' status of the foodtech unicorn

Gurugram-based foodtech unicorn Zomato has announced that Chief Operating Officer (COO) Gaurav Gupta has been given the title of 'Co-founder' of the company. According to media reports, this move was announced by Co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal on Friday.

Gaurav Gupta has been associated with Zomato for almost four years now and earlier, in January last year, he was made the COO of the food delivery and restaurant discovery platform. Prior to this, Gaurav worked as a consultant at AT Kearney.

According to media reports, in an internal mail, Deepinder stated: "Starting today, we are going to call GG 'co-founder and COO', in addition to his COO role. This is not a 'reward' - this is empowerment, for the right person, to seamlessly be able to level-up to a role which he has shown the potential for."

Last year in March, Pankaj Chaddah, who had co-founded Zomato along with Deepinder Goyal, moved out of the company but remained a part of the Board of Directors. This move came right after the company confirmed that it had raised $150 million from Ant Financial, Alibaba's payment affiliate, and got the 'unicorn' status.

Earlier in December, Durga Raghunath, Chief Executive of Indian Express Digital Media Services, had re-joined Zomato back as the Senior Vice President - Growth, after her short stint in 2015.

Zomato has been in business since 10 years now and has also entered into the supply chain business. The company on Friday, opened a 30,000 sqft HyperPure warehouse in Bengaluru to serve fresh raw materials to more than 2,500 restaurants. The warehouse is said to have capacity for 4,000 metric ton produce per month.

Last year, Zomato had acquired raw materials and ingredient supplies platform for restaurants WOTU (now rebranded as HyperPure). It follows a farm-to-fork model where HyperPure directly works with farmers, mills, producers, and processors, and enables Zomato to provide fresh produce to the restaurants.

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