Zomato FY17 Revenue Soars 80% On Ad Growth, Food Delivery Business

Online restaurant guide and food ordering startup Zomato posted a revenue growth of 80 percent at $49 million for the financial year 2016-17 due to growth in advertisements and the food ordering business.

The company may see a return to profitability, having lowered its annual cash burn (the rate at which a company is losing money) to $12 million for the current financial year from $64 million in the same period last year, Chief Operating Officer Surobhi Das said in a company blogpost on Wednesday.

“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 $4.2 million 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,” Das wrote in the blogpost.

The advertising business grew 58 percent year-on-year to $38 million in FY17, according to the blogpost. The food delivery business, where Zomato competes with Swiggy, saw an eight-fold growth in revenue to $9 million compared to FY16.

Zomato has raised funding worth $223 million since its inception in 2008, according to data cited by Crunchbase, which aggregates information on startups. The firm was last valued at $1 billion when it raised a $60 million investment by Singapore government's investment company Temasek and existing investor Vy Capital.