Excl: Restaurant reservation startup Dineout raises angel funding

Dineout Services Pvt Ltd, which runs online restaurant booking site Dineout.co.in, has raised Rs 60 lakh or $115,000 in angel round of funding from the founders of Travel Boutique online, a B2B online travel agency. For more details of the quantum of stake involved in the funding click here.

The site helps consumers book their tables at restaurants in Delhi and get discounts in return. The startup, which took its website live in February this year, is currently present in Delhi NCR and has partnered with more than 200 restaurants.

It has attracted investment from Travel Boutique Online co-founders Ankush Nijhawan and Gaurav Bhatnagar. In April this year, MIH Group, a subsidiary of South African media conglomerate Naspers and owner of social networking site Ibibo, had acquired a 51 per cent stake in Gurgaon-based Tek Travels, which owns Travel Boutique Online.

Dineout currently claims to be clocking 8,000 bookings a month. "We plan to have 15,000 bookings a month by March 2013.  We will use these funds to invest in technology and will be launching a mobile app for iOS and Android this year," said Jain. The company is also looking to expand operations in other cities like Mumbai and Bangalore.

Dineout was co-founded by Ankit Mehrotra, Sahil Jain and Nikhil Bakshi. Sahil is an IIM graduate, who returned to Delhi after a stint in the US with an analytics company for 1.5 years. He was joined by Ankit, an investment banker by profession, living in London for the last 10 years, who also quit his job to come back and start Dineout. Third founder Nikhil is from the financial background, and was working with DSP Blackrock for five years. Vivek too joins from a completely diverse background -- he served the Navy before this for 10 years.

The startup competes with Tablewalla.com (which recently went live accepting table bookings for restaurants in Mumbai and Delhi), JustEat that allows users to order food as well as book tables across in over 2,000 restaurants in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai and TableGrabber, which offers table booking in Delhi-NCR. Then there is Bookurtable that also allows both ordering and booking in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi/NCR, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune and Poshvine that offers booking in premium restaurants in Bangalore.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)