It’s been 45 days since we launched Zomato Treats in multiple cities, after a month-long pilot in Gurgaon. Treats is a membership program specially crafted for our users who love using Zomato Order to get food delivered home. As a Zomato Treats member you get a complimentary dessert, handcrafted by the restaurant’s chef, every time you order a meal from one of our partner restaurants in India or the UAE.

Why treats? Ever since we launched Zomato Gold for our users in the UAE and Portugal back in March, we’d been getting requests from our loyalest users in India asking what we had in store for them. While we’re lining up the launch of Zomato Gold in India soon, we wanted to start off by introducing something for our food ordering users first.

Buying a subscription in India lets you use it in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune, and Ahmedabad. Buy it in the UAE, and you can use it in either Dubai or Abu Dhabi. That’s the beauty of Treats – you can order a meal online from a partner restaurant in any of these cities, and you will receive dessert with it. These desserts are, most of the times, the most popular desserts in a restaurant’s menu.

And to sweeten the deal further, Treats is priced at just ₹299 per year in India, and 39 AED for six months in the UAE! Zomato Treats is one of those things in life which are too good to be and true.

How’s it going? Today we’re delighted to announce that we’ve hit our first milestone with over 10,000 paid subscribers for Zomato Treats, and have already served over 80,000 complimentary desserts as part of the program! From Phirni to Brownies and Oreo Shakes to Detox Juices - our 2500 partner restaurants are delighting users with sweet surprises every day :)

We have already seen a ~25% jump in order frequency for members subscribing to Zomato treats and see this trend holding over time.

Talking about sweet deals here’s what a couple of our users have to say about Zomato Treats –

Raise your hands if #zomatotreats is the best thing to happen to you! @ZomatoIN
Complementary shake with sandwich 👊 pic.twitter.com/MWSGPpL450

— crazyreader_pearl (@pearl_cr)

May 20, 2017

@Zomato wonderful execution of the loyalty program.. #zomatotreats would sure help delete the other food delivery apps.

— Bharat Jhurani (@bharatjhurani)

June 24, 2017

Eeee! Finally registered for the @ZomatoIN Treats Membership 😁 can’t wait for my dessert from @thaifoodhouse_ now ❤️

— Smriti Raghunandan (@famishedpanda)

June 3, 2017

Zomato Treats has also been a significant lever in driving user retention for our partner restaurants.

Here’s what some of our restaurant partners have to say about Zomato Treats -

“The response from customers using Zomato Treats has been great. We have seen a spike in orders, as well as an increase in the number of orders placed even by our existing customer base. This also gives us the chance to deliver a happy delight alongside great food to our customers." – Kaushik Roy, Biryani By Kilo (Delhi, India)

“Zomato Treats has helped us acquire new customers. Our overall business has grown over 40%. I don’t think it’s only about the free item, it’s about people trying my food and coming back for more.” – Zuber Shaikh  Owner, Alishan Restaurant (Dubai, UAE)

"Zomato as a platform has been instrumental in generating orders for our delivery business. I would even go so far as to says it’s the best food online ordering platform for us. With the launch of this new feature - Zomato Treats we have been getting a lot more visibility and have seen a huge spike in the number of orders. We have already seen a 30% growth in orders, which we really appreciate." – Sameer Gazdar, Bistro At Coffee Break. (Mumbai, India)

"Zomato Treats has turned out to be a pretty cool feature for us. We have a delicious Carrot Halwa so it’s a great way for people to try our dessert. Most importantly, we saw a massive increase in frequency of orders from our customers, as well as getting new customers." – Tahir Shah (Owner), Moti Roti (Dubai, UAE)

“We’re very glad Zomato approached us with the opportunity to partner for Treats. Thanks to more visibility, we’ve been getting a lot more orders than before, and plenty of appreciation from our users. It’s a great platform for us to promote what we have to offer, and we look forward to continuing to grow with them.” – Anshu Raj, Caterspoint (Delhi, India)

In a nutshell, we’re super stoked to have created a product that our users love and our partners find immensely beneficial. We will report back when we hit the next milestone. Until then, please keep enjoying Zomato Treats.

As most of you know, our commitment to enhance our security practices and improve our overall infrastructure has been further strengthened in light of the recent data breach we experienced. We have since taken several critical measures to strengthen and boost our security checks. Apart from updating existing security practices and improving our overall infrastructure, we’ve also started engaging with the broader security researcher community.

Introducing our new bug bounty program

HackerOne is one of the world’s leading platforms which brings companies and security experts together. We’re excited to announce the launch of our monetary reward-based bug bounty program on HackerOne today.

The scope of the program revolves around reporting technical vulnerabilities across our products (web and mobile). The rewards for these bug reports will be based on the severity of potential vulnerability and will be assessed on a case-by-case basis by our infrastructure security team. For example, the rewards may be higher for unique and hard-to-find bugs, and relatively lower for bugs with lower risk of exploitation. The minimum reward for severe bugs like Remote Code Execution or User Personal Information Access is $1000 USD.

We would like to thank the team at HackerOne for the guidance and support they have extended to us over the last few weeks.

We also encourage security researchers to intimate us of any potential security issues. We will make every effort to quickly resolve all reported issues. To qualify for a bounty, the issue must be reported through HackerOne. More details here.

Learning from our peers and industry experts

Last year, we launched a technology-focused community initiative Huddle, with the aim of discussing the challenges the Indian tech ecosystem faces every day. The idea was to create a platform to share our combined learnings, gain feedback and perspective, and exchange ideas.

The theme for our next Huddle is “Cyber Security”. In addition to sharing our story, we have invited our peers from the Indian tech community, as well as a few industry experts to add their perspective on data security. During the event, scheduled for the 8th of July, we will deep dive into the existing and foreseeable challenges of cyber security. Stay tuned to our Engineering Blog, where we will be posting insights and learnings from this Huddle.

If you’re interested in attending the next Huddle, please register here. Since we have limited capacity, we’ll get back to you as soon as possible with a confirmation along with additional details about the event. Just in case we run out of space, and aren’t able to accommodate everyone on the 8th, we’ll make sure that we extend invitations for future Huddles to folks who miss out.

For more details, kindly drop a mail to [email protected] - and we will get back to you promptly.

Like we previously posted on our blog here and here, a part of our infrastructure that was used to store user’s information was breached by an ethical hacker. The data downloaded as a result of this breach contained five data points for 17 million users - names, emails, numeric user IDs, usernames, and password hashes. The password hashes leak was a little more contained and impacted a subset of 6.6 million users - all the other users were using Facebook/Google for login - we don’t have any password information for those accounts.

The hacker had listed these data points on a dark web marketplace.

We were lucky we could get in touch with the person (hacker) in good time. As it turned out, the hacker was a security researcher (ethical hacker) who had put up the data for sale to get our attention (and/or to teach us a lesson). He/she only wanted us to launch a good bug bounty program on Hackerone, as he/she wanted to make sure that security researchers were rewarded well for their work. The hacker also shared the database with us and took the sales link down once we promised to launch the bug bounty program. He/she also agreed to destroy the data at their end immediately.

Since we hope no other company faces a breach like we did, we wanted to share our learnings from this incident and hope this is helpful for other growing companies.

How did the hacker get access to this data?

The hacker explained to us how he/she was able to breach our infrastructure to access a part of our database.

It all started in November 2015, when 000webhost’s user database was leaked online (with plain text passwords). One of our developers had his personal hosting account with the service. As a result of 000webhost’s user account data breach, his email address and password also became available publicly.

Unfortunately, the developer was using the same email and password combination on Github. Back then, when 000webhost passwords leaked, we were not using 2 factor authentication on Github (we have been using two-factor authentication on Github since the last few months). With the login credentials for the developer, the hacker was able to use the developer’s password to get into his Github account and review one of our code repositories to which the developer had access (this happened some time last year, but for some reason the hacker only exploited the code very recently).

Getting access to a part of the code didn’t give the hacker direct access to the database. Our systems are only accessible for a specific set of IP addresses. But the hacker was able to scan through the code, and he ended up exploiting a vulnerability in the code to access the database (via remote code execution). The piece of code which was vulnerable was a part of a deprecated system, and hadn’t been modified for a few years now.

Yes, someone has some of our code, and that’s a risk. But we have taken every step conceivable to us to make sure that the code cannot be exploited in any way possible to breach Zomato’s infrastructure. Also, one more thought that gives us comfort - with every passing day, the leaked code is getting more and more out-of-date.

While this is a case of extraordinarily bad luck, we were fortunate enough to resolve this with minimal damage. This incident taught us a good lesson on the importance of security and how we have to be paranoid about it going forward.

In hindsight, what helped us contain the extent of the breach?

1. Our use of multiple environments, each segregating and containing a part of business ensured that the data breach was limited to only one part of Zomato’s database; and the hacker did not gain access to all the various databases used by different businesses.
2. Additionally, we had made two-factor authentication on Github mandatory a few months back, which cut off the hacker’s access to the developer’s Github account for updated code. The hacker was working off an old code base - and this code base had changed significantly over the last few months, limiting the extent of data the hacker could access with the copy of the old code base.
3. Keeping lines of communication open with the hacker helped us understand his/her motive of the breach and address his/her (very reasonable) demands. This in turn, led to the hacker cooperating with us by pulling down the sales listing from the dark web.
4. We have good network restrictions in place, which ensured that our servers weren’t compromised. Which also means that our payment processing systems which run on a separate secure environment (PCI DSS Level 1 Certified) were never compromised. We have also submitted a compliance report after a detailed assessment to our payment partners - Visa Inc, and our payment gateway partners.

How did this impact the business?

We got an overwhelming amount of support from our users. Our traffic and food ordering have been holding flat or growing in the aftermath of the incident. We are thankful and extremely lucky to have a brand/product which people love and are willing to forgive for even some very big mistakes. We really hope we don’t let any of our users down anytime in the future.

What’s next?

Our team’s commitment to addressing reports for all security issues in a responsible and timely manner has become even stronger. We will continue to follow best practices and learn from the ethical hacker community to make Zomato a safer place for all users.

We are also in the process of introducing a monetary reward based bug bounty program on Hackerone very soon.

We are actively working to ensure all our systems are secure, and will also continue to invest in securing our users’ data by adopting more stringent security practices.

We are also going to invest time and effort in creating a “working group” of internet companies in India and exchange knowledge about best practices for security. We will also hold meet-ups (like the Product Huddle we conduct in Delhi NCR) so that young and large internet companies can get together and learn from each other about security.

Last thing - we have since been advised by multiple industry experts to take some action against the developer, in order to “set an example” and “influence public perception”. We know that this mishap is on the organisation, and not on an individual. Instead of pinning the responsibility on someone, we are going to use this as a learning opportunity for all of us.

- Deepinder & Gunjan

Earlier today, our security team discovered that user emails and hashed passwords were stolen from our database. Since then, we have taken multiple steps to mitigate the situation. One of these steps was to open a line of communication with the hacker who had put the user data up for sale.

The hacker has been very cooperative with us. He/she wanted us to acknowledge security vulnerabilities in our system and work with the ethical hacker community to plug the gaps. His/her key request was that we run a healthy bug bounty program for security researchers.

We are introducing a bug bounty program on Hackerone very soon. With that assurance, the hacker has in turn agreed to destroy all copies of the stolen data and take the data off the dark web marketplace. The marketplace link which was being used to sell the data on the dark web is no longer available.

This incident has made our team’s commitment to addressing all our security issues in a responsible and timely manner even stronger. We look forward to working more closely with the ethical hacker community, to make Zomato a safer place for our users.

Having said that, we are going to be cautious and paranoid, as this is a sensitive matter. 6.6 million users had password hashes in the ‘leaked’ data, which can be theoretically decrypted using brute force algorithms. We will be reaching out to these users to get them to update their password on all services where they might have used the same password.

Please note that only 5 data points were exposed - user IDs, Names, Usernames, Email addresses, and Password Hashes with salt. No other information was exposed to anyone (we have a copy of the ‘leaked’ database with us). Your payment information is absolutely safe, and there’s no need to panic.

–

The hacker also gave us all the details on the way he/she got access to this database. We will post this information on our blog once we close the loopholes, so that others can learn from our mistakes.

[Update] 60% of our users use third party OAuth services (i.e. Google and Facebook) for logging in to Zomato. We don’t have any passwords for these accounts - therefore, these users are at zero risk - both within Zomato, as well as on Google and Facebook (and any other services where the same Google/Facebook ID is being used to log in). For all our other users, as a safety measure, we strongly advise changing your passwords on other services where you might have used the same password as Zomato - we are also sending emails to such users prompting them to do the same as we speak.

—–

Over 120 million users visit Zomato every month. What binds all of these varied individuals is the desire to enjoy the best a city has to offer, in terms of food. When Zomato users trust us with their personal information, they naturally expect the information to be safeguarded. And that’s something we do diligently, without fail. We take cyber security very seriously - if you’ve been a regular at Zomato for years, you’d agree.

The reason you’re reading this blog post is because of a recent discovery by our security team - about 17 million user records from our database were stolen. The stolen information has user email addresses and hashed passwords.

We hash passwords with a one-way hashing algorithm, with multiple hashing iterations and individual salt per password. This means your password cannot be easily converted back to plain text. We however, strongly advise you to change your password for any other services where you are using the same password.

Important note - payment related information on Zomato is stored separately from this (stolen) data in a highly secure PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) compliant vault. No payment information or credit card data has been stolen/leaked.

As a precaution, we have reset the passwords for all affected users and logged them out of the app and website. Our team is actively scanning all possible breach vectors and closing any gaps in our environment. So far, it looks like an internal (human) security breach - some employee’s development account got compromised. [Update: The hacker has provided exact details of how he/she stole the data. The loophole has been plugged to prevent any further data leakage. Complete update: http://blog.zomato.com/post/160807042556/security-notice-update]

How can this stolen information be misused?

Since we have reset the passwords for all affected users and logged them out of the app and website, your zomato account is secure. Your credit card information on Zomato is fully secure, so there’s nothing to worry about there.

What next?

Over the next couple of days and weeks, we’ll be actively working to plug any more security gaps that we find in our systems.

• We’ll be further enhancing security measures for all user information stored within our database
• A layer of authorisation will be added for internal teams having access to this data to avoid the possibility of any human breach.

We regret any disruption this may cause and appreciate your immediate attention to this information. If you have queries/concerns, please do not hesitate to contact our security team by sending an email directly to [email protected] and we’ll reach out to you right away.

“Desserts are like a feel-good song; and the best ones make you dance.” – Chef Edward Lee

Ever since we launched Zomato Gold, our first subscription-based product for our users in the UAE and Portugal, we’ve been getting a lot of emails from some of our loyal users in India asking what we’ll be doing for them. While we’re lining up the launch of Zomato Gold in India in a couple of months, we wanted to start off by introducing something for our food ordering users in India first.

How, you might ask? With the aptly titled Zomato Treats, a subscription-based service for Zomato users in India as well as the UAE. If you live in any of the 16 cities where we offer online food delivery, a Zomato Treats subscription will get you a FREE dessert with every meal you order online on Zomato at participating restaurants.

If the child in you is jumping with joy, well, it should :-)

Furthermore, the subscription isn’t limited to a single city – you can use it if you’re ordering online in any of the 16 cities where we will eventually have Treats. Just because you aren’t home, doesn’t mean you should miss out on dessert. We’ll be rolling this out to everyone in phases over the next few weeks. Starting now, 20% of our users in Gurgaon will have the option to buy Zomato Treats and make life sweeter than before.

Having a sweet tooth isn’t such a bad thing now, is it? :-)

“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.” - Mother Teresa

In the past, we’ve tried to do our bit to help the community, and the support we’ve received for our efforts from our restaurant partners and users has always been nothing short of amazing. Just over 12 months ago, we were able to accomplish this and then this in Chennai, thanks to thousands of people coming together and using Zomato to help others who were stuck in the floods. The outpouring of support we got from our users thanking us for the opportunity created by our platform to lend their support to a worthy cause, was as inspiring as it was humbling.

We pray that such things never happen again.

But all this time, we’ve been thinking about how Zomato can bring people together and help them contribute towards a common cause. The right time to drive change is when everything is running smoothly, rather than only reacting when disaster strikes.

Building on that thought, we’re setting something more enduring in motion – an ongoing initiative we’re calling ‘Turn the Tables’. Think of it as our way of bringing millions of Zomato users, our thousands of restaurant partners, and our team together with our shared love of food, to help tackle challenges that many of our friends and loved ones face in their daily lives.

The first edition of Turn the Tables is focused on a cause much of the world is working towards – helping cancer patients; more specifically, raising awareness about the disease and providing aid for cancer research. With 454.8 new cases of cancer and 171.2 deaths per 100,000 men and women each year, it’s evident that fighting to find a cure for this illness is an uphill battle.

We understand the sheer magnitude of the problem, but we want to do our bit, and felt we had to start somewhere. So we reached out to restaurants across Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, and – unsurprisingly – received an overwhelming response from a large number of them. And this is where our users come in. From the 7th to the 16th of April, these partner restaurants will be offering specially designed set menus. For every guest who dines in support of the cause, ₹100 will go towards our partner NGOs – Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA), and Karunashraya, who do excellent work providing aid and treatment to cancer patients.

Hundreds of Zomato users have already made bookings online in support of this 10-day long event, which is the first of many more to follow. At the time of writing this, we’ve already raised ₹2.86 Lakhs, and counting. It’s a small start, but a start nonetheless, and we’re very excited about the next few days. Amazing things happen when the community comes together, and we know we can expect a lot more people joining in and doing their bit to help the cause.

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” - Benjamin Franklin

Disclaimer : all numbers in this “short form” annual report are unaudited. Exact numbers might change in small deltas while we go through the audit.

If I have to define the last year for Zomato in just two words, these will be perseverance and focus. All of us at Zomato simply put our heads down to execute.

FY16 (ending March 2016), a year ago, wasn’t ideal for us despite having achieved 2x revenue growth over FY15. That’s because our cash burn was very high at an average of $4.2m a month.

Along with the burn rate, we were also in the middle of consolidating/ rationalising our international operations to make better use of our execution bandwidth moving forward. We had just come out of the layoffs in some of our international markets, and our team’s morale wasn’t in the best shape. Additionally, back then, we were very new to the transactions space (online food ordering) and there was a lot to learn in order to stay ahead of competition.

We believe we executed reasonably well in the last year, in spite of the hard challenges in front of us. There’s still a lot to learn. Our March 2017 revenue is $5m, helping us exit the last financial year at a $60m/year revenue run rate. We achieved $49m in revenue in FY17, a growth of ~80% over FY16.

Along with a growth in revenue, we also reduced our annual operating burn from $64m in FY ‘16 to $12m in FY’17 ($75m losses reported last year included a significant amount of non-operating burn i.e. non-cash items - depreciation, amortization and non cash provisions).

Right now, the average monthly cash burn for the period of December 2016 - March 2017 is a little less than $250k globally, down from $4.2m last March; and we’re well on our way to hit profitability.

Meanwhile, we beefed up our focus on product, engineering and traffic growth, helping our overall traffic and engagement numbers immensely. Here’s how our March 2017 traffic and engagement numbers stack up against March 2016.

All this time, while we were focused on reducing burn, and ramping up revenue, we didn’t compromise or cut down on any growth engines. In fact, the last 12 months saw the most amount of innovation coming out of Zomato. Here are a few things which happened in the last year -

Re-designing our ads model

In mid 2016, we redesigned our ad serving product to drive more value to our users as well as merchants. For starters, we stopped accepting advertising from low rated restaurants, so that our users only see the best that’s out there. The new product provided smarter targeting, simpler interface and greater visibility to our well rated advertisers. We rolled this out globally by September 2016 and helped our merchants realise a ~3x increase in value from advertising on Zomato. Our ad sales revenue grew to ~$38m in FY17.

We also further enhanced the efficacy of our sales team, which led to over 83% growth in productivity (revenue/headcount) in our ads business.

Scaling up food ordering (delivery); introducing Zomato Infrastructure Services

Our food ordering team worked simultaneously on multiple fronts - user onboarding, experience, and retention along with restaurateur experience and real time payment settlements. All these initiatives helped in further enhancing our efficiency and helped in hitting 2.1 million monthly order volume in March, while keeping our unit economics positive.

Read more about our food ordering unit economics here.

Our customer delight (support) team didn’t shy away from taking a non-orthodox approach when it came to transform hungry users to happy users, and this reflected in our average order ratings and user cohorts. Our user cohorts look quite like a ‘smile’ - which is the holy grail of user cohorts. User retention and increasing frequency is so good that even if we don’t acquire any new users in April 2017, we will still grow 8% over our March volume.

Our food ordering revenue grew to ~$9m in FY’17, 8x of FY16. We are now present in 13 cities in India, and 3 cities in UAE. Middle East is very high on adoption for Zomato, and we are preparing for launching food ordering in Beirut, the Paris of Middle East.

The above wouldn’t have been possible without the cooperation of our restaurateur network. Our team worked closely with our merchants and resolved the recurring issues on ground, resulting in very low order rejections, more timely deliveries and, consequently, higher order ratings.

We also launched our first cloud kitchen in Delhi NCR which can potentially give a huge boost to our online food ordering business. You can read more about that here.

Introducing Table Reservations

On the back of our increased user engagement levels, we launched Table reservations product in July 2016, and became the market leaders in India and UAE within a month of launch. Currently we have the table reservation option across 24,000 restaurants in 12 cities. In the month of March, we seated 600k guests via our table reservations product.

Read how we grew in our table reservations business in our blog post - “The real value of discount-based customer acquisition strategy”.

Launching Zomato Gold

We also launched a premium membership programme, Zomato Gold, in Lisbon and Dubai in March 2017. The willingness of restaurants to get on board, and the whopping response from users assures us we are on the right track, and see a long, fulfilling journey ahead.

Read the blog post for launch of Zomato Gold in Dubai and Lisbon.

Beta-testing Zomato Base

Our Point of Sale product is finally starting to take shape, and is undergoing paid beta trials at over ~200 restaurants of various types and sizes. The upcoming year should definitely see increased adoption of Zomato Base by restaurants across India, UAE and beyond.

–

Over the last year, the composition of our senior leadership team has evolved for the better, and we have been able to successfully integrate some new people into key roles within the organisation. For example, Mukund Kulashekaran is leading our food ordering business, Gaurav Gupta is leading our Table Reservations business. Samir Kuckreja is leading Zomato Base. We also very recently welcomed our new President and COO, Deepak Gulati (ex-CEO Tata Docomo) to Zomato.

–

Overall, we are in a good place now. The team is hungry for moonshots, and is keeping its head down, learning and executing well. Of course, there’s always a lot more ahead of us and we all truly believe that we are only 1% done.

Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post by Deepinder - “Learnings from 2016”. We realised Deepinder is never going to get around to writing this, so please don’t stay tuned!

Important note : this is all the data we can and will share for now. Info Edge is a significant public shareholder, therefore we will need to refrain from sharing any information outside the public domain (i.e. our blog).

“Sometimes, it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.” - Anonymous

In the summer of 2015, when we were preparing to launch online food ordering services in India, we had more questions than answers. Yes we had a blueprint in place, and a dedicated team that enjoys tough challenges, but we were still… what’s the word… hungry? Hungry to learn and know more. Until we stepped into the river, we wouldn’t know how cold it was. At the same time, we knew we were capable of achieving what we were setting out to achieve. Since then, we’ve managed to meet expectations in a lot of ways.

In the month of March (2017), with a little more than a day to go, we have processed 2m online food orders through Zomato.

The journey from 1m orders to 2m orders was a hard one, and we learnt a lot about what matters and what doesn’t. Here are some of the ways we got here - 

• Better customer retention - a million small things, which ended up compounding towards the current milestone.
• Maniacal focus on customer support. We introduced a new “motto” for our customer support team - “every meal matters”. Since then, the customer support team has been very proactive about every single order that goes through Zomato, and our users are loving us even more than before.
• Effective and faster customer acquisition at negligible cost (our marketing budget for food ordering still hovers around $50k per month).
• We increased the restaurant supply available on Zomato from 12,000 restaurants a few months ago to 18,000 today.

Here are some more numbers which might interest you –

• March will grow ~23%+ over February
• By platform, Android contributes ~48%, iPhone ~36% and Web ~16%
• Average order value is ~INR 430 for India and ~AED 62 for UAE
• The share of restaurant-delivered orders is close to 90%
• Average delivery time is approximately 38 minutes
• Average commission rates of ~8.5% (for restaurant-delivered orders)
• Unit economics are very positive and our net margins on an order are ~55%
• Online food ordering contributes ~20% revenue to our overall topline

We have a great team building our food ordering business. This milestone is a testimony to the quality, focus, and persistence of our team here.

Which brings us to the most important part - our users and restaurateur partners who make everything possible. Without the former’s trust in us, there would be no reason to better ourselves. Without the latter’s belief in us, there would be no variety to look forward to. I take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank everyone for their unwavering faith in us.

Lastly, there are many more millions to come. We are now the leading food ordering platform in India and UAE. We are also the largest food search/discovery platform in 13 countries outside of India. It is humbling for us to have a shot at building the first truly global consumer internet brand, born and brought up in India. With your continuing love and feedback, we will get there very soon.

🙌

There are so many different reasons to look forward to an evening drink. Very often, you’re itching to head out with your friends because there’s something big to celebrate!

If you’ve ever had to second-guess a night out on the town, we’ll make sure you never have to again. After all, why think twice, when you can drink twice?

We’re very proud to present our newest product offering in the UAE, to help make night out decisions a lot easier for you and for your pocket – Zomato Gold. It’s been just a week since we soft launched Zomato Gold in Dubai, and the initial response we have seen from our users has been staggering.

But first, what is Zomato Gold?

Quite simply, it is a membership program for a premium nightlife experience in the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi –

• It lets you enjoy up to two rounds of 1+1 on any beverage at many top restaurants, bars and lounges.
• You can enjoy Gold benefits any time and on any day of the week. Happy hours just got that much longer.
• Users can buy a 3-month, a 6-month, or a 12-month membership plan. The introductory prices right now start at as low as AED 99
• There are more than 200 premium Gold partners (restaurants, bars and lounges) to choose from, located in popular areas such as JLT, Barsha, DIFC, Downtown Dubai, Trade Centre, Deira, and pretty much all over Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
• A single membership plan for Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
• We have made sure that there’s a Gold partner within 3 kilometers of anywhere in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
• Your membership will let you visit any of the Gold partner restaurants that you like on any given day/time, and you can visit each partner more than once.

What we personally love about Gold is how much you end up saving. The 1+1 benefit can get you 4 drinks for the price of 2 at any of our partners on a single visit, and thus double the value. We also love the fact that Gold is applicable even during peak hours on weekends.

To check out Zomato Gold, download/open the Zomato app, change your location to Dubai (if you aren’t already there), and look out for the “Introducing Zomato Gold” banner on your home screen.

What makes Gold special?

Unlike any other similar product out there, we focused very heavily on making Gold the most extensive and convenient dining membership program out there.

• Zomato Gold has the widest possible range of partner restaurants, bars and lounges – 200+ so far, and we’re going to keep adding to them.
• We made sure that most of these places are the top-rated places on Zomato
• There’s no restriction on the drinks you can order with your membership. The entire drinks menu is yours to choose from.
• Gold is ultra convenient to use - there’s no need to punch in anything on your phone or scan QR codes. Just one tap on the partner restaurant’s page on the Zomato app, and you are all set.

If you live in Dubai, or travel there often, we hope this product appeals to you. We look forward to you becoming a member. Open your Zomato app to do just that.

When will Zomato Gold arrive in other cities?

Gold will arrive in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore somewhere around June. We will decide launch dates for other international cities depending on what we learn over the next few weeks/months. Our Melbourne, Jo’burg, and Istanbul teams are waiting eagerly to launch Zomato Gold in their cities 🙇🏼 .

Any questions?

Please email [email protected]

PS

1. If you use Zomato Gold for alcoholic drinks, please drink responsibly, and don’t be a jerk.
   
2. Zomato Gold launched in Lisbon already with a membership program to get 1+1 on food, not on drinks. The blog post (in Portuguese) for our Lisbon launch was published two weeks ago here.