Zomato Moves To Take On OpenTable With NexTable Acquisition

With no pause to enjoy their reportedly billion dollar valuation, Zomato has snapped up NexTable – a restaurant reservation business and table management platform, TechCrunch reported.

This latest acquisition follows the India-based startup’s announcement of a $50 million funding pickup last week, and their first acquisition outside the restaurant space: payments platform MaplePOS. Zomato’s restaurant search app is currently open for business in 22 countries.

And, with the two new acquisition, it seems likely that the Indian startup is getting ready to directly challenge established reservation players like Priceline’s OpenTable and Yelp’s SeatMe.

Soon to be relaunched as Zomato Book, the firm’s newest acquisition will be purchased for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock, and will import the NexTable team along with the tech. That will include CEO and founder TC DeSilva and Robert Tyree, who was the driving force behind the customized Web portals and widgets to let restaurants update their own profiles.

NexTable did not have outside funding, and was based out of North Carolina – which was a limitation for the firm.

“For any new table reservations product, no matter how good it is, it’s very 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. Secondly, it is hard to sell the product if you don’t have a significant consumer presence,” TC DeSilva said in a statement. “Zomato solves both these issues for us, and we are excited to partner with them to realize the true potential of what we have built.”

The service, though U.S.-based will also get a crack at international markets in India, UAE and Australia. This will mark Zomato’s second U.S. acquisition after purchasing Urbanspoon in January of this year for $52 million.

NexTable opens up possibilities for better monetization of Zomato’s search listings.

“We want to own the communication layer between 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,” said Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder and operations head at Zomato, noting that reservations was one of the last segments that Zomato needed to fill out its business offering. “NexTable completes the value chain between the consumer and the restaurant.”

Zomato has had a busy year when it comes to acquisitions – having made nine in the last nine months.