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Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Eat App wants a bite of India’s restaurant reservation business with an aquistion and Swiggy partnership

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Dubai-based restaurant reservation startup Eat App aims to make India a focal point of its business with new fundraising, an acquisition, and partnering with Swiggy to sell a solution to restaurants to aggregate reservation data and grow their business based on that.

The company said that it has raised $10 million in a Series B extension round led by PSG Equity through its portfolio company Zenchef SAS. Notably, this amount is larger than the startup’s original Series B round of $6 million in 2022. With this fundraiser, Eat App has now raised over $23 million in funding to date.

The company, which has been around for more than a decade, has been present in over 92 countries, serving more than 5,000 restaurants and $12 million in ARR. However, in the last 12 months, India has been a central focus for the company as it scaled to over 2,000 restaurants in the country.

India’s food service industry is set to reach over $85 billion by 2028, according to industry reports, with dine-in making more than half of it. Restaurants are relying on walk-ins and separately managing their reservations coming from sources like Zomato, Swiggy, and EazyDiner.

To achieve scale, Eat App acquired a rival called ReserveGo and also partnered with a recently listed food and grocery platform, Swiggy, to upsell its restaurant product.

ReserveGo was built by Vijayan Parthasarathy in 2022. Parthasarathy has had a storied history in restarant reservation industry. Prior to ReserveGo, he built a similar platform called Inrestro in 2014, which was acquired by Times Internet-owned Dineout in 2015. In 2022, Swiggy acquired Dineout from Times Internet.

Eat App acquired ReverseGo in mid-2025, which was serving over 1,000 restaurants at that time. Parthasarathy told TechCrunch that the platform has averaged handling 5 million reservations per month for the last 12 months without having any downtimes.

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EatApp also partnered with Swiggy to market its product to restaurants for upselling, which has taken the total restaurant tally for the startup over 2,000, with over 8 million covers served until the year’s end through various platforms. For comparison, Swiggy’s Dineout platform alone catered to over 23.8 million covers in 2025.

“There has never been a more exciting time for the restaurant industry in the country, with steady consumer uptake and innovations. We believe access to Eat App’s world-class technology and AI-driven tools is going to improve restaurant management, helping restaurants across the country bring a more delightful experience to their guests, “Arpit Mathur, Vice President of Strategy at Swiggy, said in a statement.

The company, which was listed on the Indian markets last year, said that it partnered with Eat App to bring a global solution for restaurants to grow their business.

Swiggy and EatApp market this solution as GroMax for India, which includes add-ons such as the ability to promote restaurants on Meta and Swiggy, apart from reservation management. While Swiggy doesn’t play a part in product development, its sales team provides input to Eat App about potential features it can develop for the market.

Image Credits: Eat App

Before its India expansion, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was its biggest market, followed by the U.S., the U.K, and Saudi Arabia.

“Honestly, like we see India, there’s very strong synergy and similarities between what we’ve seen in the [GCC] region eight, nine years ago, especially in Dubai, where we first, I would say, we were responsible for building that scaffolding, that tech infrastructure layer [for serving restaurants]. And we see a lot of similarities in India. [to that],” Nezar Kadhem, CEO of Eat App, told TechCrunch.

“We hope that whatever efforts were made in the region in Dubai and where restaurants have the tooling today, we could serve the same in India alongside local founders like Vijayan and the team to help us spearhead the change in India,” he added.

India is a market with a big opportunity in the restaurant space. However, for restaurants, the challenge is to attract customers using every channel possible and then collate those reservations in one place. Parthasarathy noted that the top 200 restaurants in India are only available for customers through reservations. But for the next few thousands it is a lot about capacity management through different channels.

Eat App’s growth faces a few obstacles. First, there are international competitors such as Seven Rooms, TableCheck, and OpenTable, along with local ones like PetPooja and Posist. Second, some restaurants just bank on walk-ins or do not use an aggregation software to get data about their diners.

Several industry executives TechCrunch spoke with said that reservation aggregation software as a standalone product wouldn’t entice restaurant owners. Eat App will need to prove their growth suite brings enough value to restaurants.

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