Four Italian startups developers of wb based services in the food delivery sector and restaurant selection have been acquired by foreign groups in the last two months.
The last one has been Pizzabo, an Italian startup based in Bologna and a developer of a delivery platform for takeaway pizzas and other food, which has been acquired by German giant Rocket Internet. The Frankfurk-listed group’s mission is to become the world’s largest Internet platform outside of China and the United States. Rocket identifies and builds proven Internet business models and transfers them to new, underserved or untapped markets where it seeks to scale them into market leading online companies.
Since the ipo in October 2014, the Food & Groceries sector has become a key focus for Rocket. In the last few days Rocket announced the creation of the Global Online Takeaway Group which combines its stake in foodpanda, the emerging market leader in the online food takeaway sector, and the acquisitions of a 30% stake in Delivery Hero (for 496 million euros) and 100% of La Nevera Roja in Spain and Pizzabo in Italy. On a combined basis the group is present in 64 countries, works with 140 thousand restaurants and based on annualized December 2014 numbers processes 78 million orders.
Rocket furthermore announced that the emerging market leader in the online food takeaway market, foodpanda, continues to make important investments to build market leading positions in Asia and bought some other companies. Finally Rocket Internet announced yesterday the acquisition of Kuwait-based Tabalat, one of the leaders in the online food takeaway market in the Middle East, for a 150 million euros total consideration.
A few days ago online travel giant TripAdvisor bought two Italian startups which are going to be integrated in its online restaurants selection and booking service TheFork. TripAdvisor actually bought MyTable and Restopolis, both being online platform to book restaurants (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
Last December Zomato, the restaurant search and discovery service backed by Vy Capital, Info Edge and Sequoia Capital, bought finally Italy’s Cibando, a Rome-based mobile and web platform for users to find restaurants. Founded in 2011 by Guk Kim, Cibando was backed by Point Nine Capital venture firm and by some business angels. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed but Zomato said it will invest 6 million euros in its newly-acquired Italian operations over the next 2 years, growing the team to 150-200 people across the country’s top six cities.
