New Delhi: Hyperlocal delivery start-up Roadrunnr on Saturday said it has acquired food ordering firm TinyOwl Technology Pvt. Ltd and has transitioned into a food ordering and delivery platform. It has also rebranded itself as Runnr.

“Runnr’s strengths lie in technology and efficiency of operations that the company has developed over the last one year. After its acquisition of TinyOwl, the company (Carthero Technologies Pvt Ltd) has decided to reposition itself as a customer centric platform and launched a full integrated app called Runnr which is now available on the iOS and google play store," the company said in a statement.

It however did not disclose the size of the deal.

Last month Mint reported that Roadrunnr and Tinyowl were merging to take on Swiggy and Zomato. Roadrunnr and Tinyowl have common investors in Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners.

Over 110 people have joined the company from Tinyowl, said Mohit Kumar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Runnr adding that around 30 of them are engineers and designers while a majority of the rest are call centre and data analytics staff. It takes the overall company’s employee strength to 180 people.

Runnr food ordering app is currently live in South Mumbai with over 150 restaurants. There is no minimum order size and the app offers live tracking of delivery.

Roadrunnr was founded early last year by Kumar and Arpit Dave who worked together at Flipkart.

In April, Mint also reported that Roadrunnr may exit the business of delivering products for e-commerce companies and focus on a few select categories such as food, groceries and merchant-to-merchant, or first-mile, deliveries.

The company said that the B2B business remains intact albeit it has gone slow on the e-commerce business.

“B2B business was pretty much driving deliveries for merchants and incidentally around 95% of that was from food so it makes sense for us to keep running B2B because it can help us derive better merchant integration. E-commerce we had slowed down a couple of months back and even in grocery the growth was not as much as food," said Kumar.

The company will be charging a flat delivery fee of ₹ 30 to the customers irrespective of order value, he said adding that it will also charge 15-30% commission from merchants.

The food delivery and takeaway market in India was pegged at $12.8 billion in 2014, however the actual penetration level has been only 0.7%, according to a report by Kotak Institutional Equities research.

The report also states that around 27% of the 40 million online shoppers order food online and the takeaway market is four times the delivery market.

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