Food technology startup Zomato acquires Runnr

Zomato plans for a stiff competition to rivals

Food technology startup Zomato acquires hyperlocal delivery startup Runnr. This is an attempt to strengthen its delivery business that currently faces stiff competition from its rival Swiggy.

Zomato was founded in 2015 by former Ola executive Mohit Kumar. His co-founders were Arpit Dave, Vatsal Singhal, Aravind Reddy, Gnanesh Chillukuri and Mukunda NS. Runnr was a specialist in handling last mile delivery for businesses. It had clients from several restaurants where Runnr handled home delivery of food. Runnr also catered to businesses in e-commerce, grocery and pharma.

Runnr had once raised an amount of $20-25 million. It was raised from biggies such as Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. Currently, the company handles about three lakh monthly orders. It had acquired food startup Tinyowl that had shut down eventually.

Experts Speak

“Emotionally, the deal has been in place for a couple of months now, and both the teams have been working closely with each other quite some time now. So much so, Mohit Kumar, founder and chief executive at Runnr, has been living in New Delhi (moving from Bengaluru) for about two months already,” Goyal wrote in a blog post.

“For us at Zomato, we saw that we were going to be working with a team of extremely driven individuals who had figured out how to solve a vital piece of our puzzle—the one that affects our user delight: logistics. With the combination of Zomato and Runnr, we have everything in the stack of building a delightful food delivery service in India and UAE - end to end - listings, discovery, reviews, ordering, and now, logistics,” he added.

With Zomato taking over another food startup, do you think its rivals Swiggy and Uber Eats will have to develop a prudent strategy to survive in the market?

Please share your views with us.

Excerpts from Forbes.