In November 2021, Zomato launched Zomato Wings to facilitate equity financing for cloud restaurants/kitchens by introducing them to investors. Zomato was unable to expand Zomato Wings due to multiple reasons, including the funding winter, the sources said. There is a possibility that Wings could be rebooted later this year.
The food tech giant partnered with revenue-based financing platforms in early 2021 to make it easier to finance restaurants, but closed the pilot within 3 months.
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Zomato Wings
Food tech giant has halted operations of the Zomato Wings platform, which it launched late last year to help restaurants connect with investors to raise fund.
Since April, things have been on hold here Zomato Wings. The funding winter has scared away the investment community, said a person familiar with the matter.
There is a possibility that Zomato Wings will restart at the end of the year. However, all activities have stopped at this time, another person familiar with the matter added.
Zomato Wings launched in November last year as an intermediary platform to facilitate restaurant/brand/kitchen equity financing in the cloud. The platform brought these companies and investors together on one platform.
As we partner with more investors by connecting them with entrepreneurial restaurants, more budding restaurants would use this platform to raise funds, and the platform flyer would create a win-win for restaurants and investors.
However, as Zomato stock price plummeted during the first six months of 2022, the startup decided to focus on its core business.
The global economic slowdown amid geopolitical tensions has not only affected the global stock market, but has also affected the financing of emerging companies. As investors turned cautious, 2022 so far has seen a sharp drop in funding, startups resorted to layoffs and slashed valuations in the Indian startup ecosystem.
Failure to take off
We understand they wanted to take action. Then they tested debt and wanted to do it internally. But they couldn’t scale it internally.
The ideal solution requires complex operational setup for the variety of restaurant partner requirements that cannot be created in house. Ideally, Zomat would partner with a financing specialist, as Wings will not always be central to its business model, the source added.
learned that the Deepinder Goyal led unicorn had started a pilot project early last year by partnering with various revenue-based financing RBF platforms to help restaurants with financing. However, the pilot project was scrapped within three months.
RBF was a very small pilot to test the appetite for alternative instruments, but the market seemed small so we didn’t expand it.
