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The European fix for Indian startups
Zomato, GreyOrange, OYO—increasingly, Indian startups are looking at Europe as a market to expand. How do you decide if that market is for you?
9 December, 2019•12 min
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9 December, 2019•12 min
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Why read this story?
Editor's note: The story of Zomato’s tryst in Europe isn’t very well documented. Unlike the Zomato of today, which has hunkered down on India and shut out everything else, the Zomato of the early part of this decade had a sense of global ambition about it. Sometime in 2011, Zomato decided that it is going to grow its business outside India. Not on a whim but the idea that its business can be easily replicated; smartphones and restaurants aren’t all that different across geographies. Starting in 2012, backed by investors like InfoEdge and Sequoia, the company was launching new countries at breakneck speed. It was determined to become one of the rare business-to-consumer, or B2C, startups coming out of India to scale internationally. Its Europe debut began with a launch in London in 2013, and almost a year later, the company had acquired six companies, four of which were in Europe. Cibando in Italy, Lunchtime in the Czech Republic, Obedovat in Slovakia and Gastronauci in Poland. Speaking to Quartz, at the time, Deepinder Goyal, Zomato’s founder said, “It is an easy win …
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