If I were to say that we are running a marathon that has “serving better food for more people” as the end objective, then it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the last nine months have been nothing short of a “super sprint” in this marathon.

I am happy to share that we’ve hit 21 million monthly food orders in India. This does not include the orders that are placed over the phone on Zomato. i.e. ~2 million orders. That means as a platform we facilitate 23 million monthly orders, (as far as we know) making us the market leader in the food ordering space in India. But who cares about phone call orders in 2018? We don’t. So let’s call it 21. To share perspective on the growth that we have experienced – at the beginning of 2018, we were at 3.5 million orders a month.

This upward swing didn’t happen overnight – we’ve been consistently pushing on all possible corners to make this happen at an unimaginable pace. Now that the first half of the year just ended, we thought we should surprise you with this short blog post on what we have been able to achieve. This is keeping in line with our ethos of being transparent – we also publish our short form annual reports every year.

We were present in 15 cities in India, at the onset of this year; our food delivery business is now active in 38 cities in India. And at the pace we are going, it’s only a matter of time before we launch our food delivery business in 100 cities.

Three years into the business, our understanding of the needs and expectations of both, our users and restaurant partners is deeper, and is evident in the growth story on both fronts.

Our new user acquisition has increased more than tenfold since January. New users that we acquire in a month have increased from 197,000 users to 2.4 million users in this time period.

On the other end of the spectrum, the number of restaurants has almost doubled from 28,000 in January to 54,000 now.

Similarly, there has been a massive shift in the proportion of orders that are self-fulfilled by Zomato. Today, 9 out of 10 orders are delivered by our own delivery partners. This figure was a little less than 3 back in January. A lot of the credit for this goes to our continued teamwork with Runnr. Our acquisition of Runnr and the ramp up of the fleet has made a massive difference to the legwork put into our food delivery business. In January 2018, there were a little over 5000 delivery executives. The number has skyrocketed to 74,000 as of now and we continue to welcome efficient delivery executives as we expand our footprint.

By increasing the proportion of self delivered orders, we have been able to favorably control and impact overall customer experience. The average time taken to deliver an order has come down from 39 minutes to 33 minutes in this time period.

Increase in number of orders has translated into a higher GMV, and higher revenue for us. Our annualized GMV presently stands at ~$1 billion compared to $210 million in January.

Understandably, the food delivery business has become a dominant part of our revenue model. When 2017 ended, online ordering contributed about 35% of our overall revenue. This figure presently floats at 65%!

We have achieved some unimaginable milestones in a very short period of time. There are some that believe that no one can sprint all the time. By definition, that is not sprinting. And that might be a fair way of looking at things. However, we at Zomato function a little differently; we like moving fast – in fact, we thrive on it. We have been sprinting for these nine months, and we are not stopping anytime soon 🙂