Rocket Internet's online food ordering venture Foodpanda acquires Russian competitor Delivery Club

Foodpanda.com (also known as Hellofood), a Rocket Internet-backed global, multi-location online food ordering marketplace with operations in 40 countries including India, has acquired its Russian competitor Delivery Club. The transaction details are not disclosed.

With this acquisition, Foodpanda will get access to over 2,500 partner restaurants via web and mobile, the company said in a press release.

"After acquiring Delivery Club, we will be the market leading food delivery marketplace in Russia, serving customers across the entire Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region," said Ralf Wenzel, co-founder and global managing director of Foodpanda.

Founded in 2009, Delivery Club is an independent club project, which brings together hundreds of delivery services, food and products in a single order system. The company is focused only on the Russian market where it is present in 18 cities.

"The deal with Foodpanda will help us to bring the product to a next level, increase our marketing efforts and continue to develop our product to one of the customer friendliest in the world. We will not stop here and continue to grow in Russia together with Foodpanda to offer the best possible service to our partners as well as customers," said Anna Shkirina, managing director of Delivery Club.

Founded in April 2012, Foodpanda features location-specific listing of restaurants on its site. Users can check out menus, along with special offers, post that they can order and get food delivered to their homes. One can also search for restaurants according to cuisine, and/or by other parameters such as vegetarian/non-veg, healthy food, etc. The company helps restaurants increase sales through online and mobile platforms and also provides them with technology and analytics.

Early this year, the firm raised $20 million in funding from Phenomen Ventures, a Russia-based venture capital firm and a group of unnamed investors.

Foodpanda has a significant present in India market, too. In an interview with Techcircle recently, Foodpanda India's managing director Rohit Chadda said that the company has partnerships with 3,500 restaurants in 33 cities across India, and has a daily page traffic of 60,000. In the country, it mainly competes with JustEat.in, which has 2,500 partner restaurants across 10 cities at present.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)