Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal

Online restaurant guide and food ordering platform Zomato is looking to raise up to USD 600 million (around Rs 4,276 crore) next month in a new funding round, Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said on Friday. The company is making all efforts to achieve its mission, ‘Better Food for Everyone’, he added.

“We are going to raise USD 500-600 million next month or so,” Goyal said adding that good companies can raise money in hard times or good times. He was speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit here.

On the journey of Zomato, Goyal said: “We started very small. We started 11 years ago and we are now present in 550 cities in India and we serve around 48 million people every month.” Outside India, Zomato serves about another 25 million people, he added.

The hardest part of this journey has been to actually hire the number of people that the company has hired, Goyal said. “We have 2,50,000 people that we hired in last 18 months,” Goyal said.

As you scale the big challenge is to ensure consistency and maintain quality. “We just have to ensure that we put the best foot forward all the time,” he added.

Talking about the social media onslaught it had to face after its decision of not discriminating on the basis of religion, Goyal said: “This is not the first time we have taken a stand for something that we believe in.”

In July this year, Zomato had refused to resolve a customer’s complaint about being assigned a Muslim delivery executive for his food order. Goyal had echoed his company’s stand, with a firm message. “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values,” he had tweeted at that time.