Kora Investments adds $52 mn to Zomato’s pre-IPO round

Gurugram headquartered food delivery unicorn Zomato has raised $52 million (Rs 378 crore) in an ongoing growth funding round from US investment firm Kora Investments.

Post deal, New York-based Kora, which has a presence in São Paulo, Mumbai, Moscow and Shanghai, will own a 1.48% stake in the Deepinder Goyal-run restaurant aggregation platform, regulatory filings showed. 

The fresh infusion is part of a targeted $600 million growth funding round, dubbed a Series J round, that Zomato intends to close before it hits the public market in 2021. 

Co-founder and CEO Goyal told Zomato employees last month that the company expected to launch an IPO by the middle of next year. The company had $250 million in the bank from the ongoing round, he said in an email at the time, adding that it would raise a total of $600 million in the round before the IPO.

It has raised $268 million in the ongoing round so far. In January, it received $50 million in the first tranche of the round in January from Ant Financial. Subsequently, it raised $62 million and $104 million from Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and Tiger Global Management in the second and third tranches, respectively.

Earlier this week, Goyal claimed that food delivery volumes on the platform had returned to pre-Covid peaks in India. He said a number of cities are witnessing over 120% of pre-Covid peaks, and expects the food delivery sector to continue to grow at about 15-25% month-on-month for the foreseeable future. Zomato has delivered a total of 9.2 crore orders since March 23, 2020, he tweeted.

The company doubled its year-on-year revenue to $394 million for the financial year 2019-20 from $192 million, even as its losses widened to $293 million from $277 million a year ago. It reported a revenue of $41 million with an EBITDA loss of $12 million during the Covid-19 hit June quarter of FY21.