Urbanspoon, which was previously owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, was acquired Monday for a reported $50 - 60 million by Zomato, a restaurant discovery website, headquartered in India.
This is one of the few instances of an Indian start up acquiring an American business. Zomato claims that this is one of the largest purchases of a U.S.-based consumer Internet company by an Indian start up.
India's expanding Internet-and mobile-based companies have been attracting billions in funding from foreign investors recently. Some of the start ups have used these investments to acquire local peers, but overseas acquisitions are rare.
By acquiring Urbanspoon, Zomato is present in 22 countries. It is expected that their web traffic will double to 80 million visits per month from 35 million. Its listings will grow to one million from 300,000.
Zomato is backed by private equity investors including Sequoia Capital and India's Info Edge India Ltd. Founded in 2008, the site wants to raise $100 million in the next 30 days from new and old investors.
"It's an all cash deal. We pretty much had to spend all our last round of funding on this and it's sort of a big deal for us," Zomato Chief Executive Deepinder Goyal told Reuters in a phone interview.
Zomato is currently valued at around $660 million. Goyal went on to say that the start up is likely to be valued at $1 billion after completing the new round of investment.
The restaurant services company has also acquired companies in Italy, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, New Zealand, and Poland.