One of the most important things we’ve been working on over the past year is making the process of online food ordering and delivery as simple and hassle-free as possible. While there are some aspects that we think we’ve done well at – bringing customers the widest choice of restaurants in the country, and building a personalised and incredibly easy-to-use app – there are some areas that have immense room for improvement, the most significant one being delivery tracking.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re taking a big leap forward in bolstering our delivery-tech capabilities with the acquisition of Sparse Labs, a logistics-tech startup that helps restaurants track and optimise their in-house delivery fleet.

Sparse Labs has developed a lightweight Android-based app, which transmits a rider’s location to both the restaurant and the user in real time. The rider can use the app to receive route information, which helps ensure quicker and more efficient deliveries. The system also allocates orders to riders based on their proximity to the restaurant, and uses machine learning to identify a rider’s familiarity with a neighbourhood to further optimise delivery efficiency. Restaurants also have the option of using a proprietary GPS tracker developed by Sparse, that can be fitted onto bikes.

Pankaj Batra, the founder of Sparse Labs has bootstrapped his product for over a year now, and is much loved by all his customers. He will continue developing his vision at Zomato, and the rest of the Zomato team is very excited to lend all their support to Pankaj going forward.

Joining forces with Sparse Labs will allow us to significantly improve the food ordering experience on the app, by giving users real-time GPS-based status updates on their order. While we were already working on making this feature available for deliveries handled by our logistics partners, Sparse Labs will now help us enable delivery tracking for restaurant-owned fleets as well.

At the restaurant end, this technology will help make deliveries highly cost- and time-efficient, allowing them to optimise delivery routes and ensuring minimal wait time for riders. We’ve always maintained that the most cost-efficient delivery fleet is the restaurant’s own, where they can utilise the same staff during off-peak hours for back-of-house and marketing activities.

Sparse Labs will be renamed as Zomato Trace, and we will be rolling out the service free of cost to our restaurant partners very soon.

The number of food orders being placed via Zomato is growing by the day, and we’re constantly thinking of ways to improve and simplify the user experience. Zomato Trace is a big step in that direction, and we’re looking forward to get this up and running to scale in the upcoming weeks.