Eat App wants to get a piece of the restaurant booking business in India through an acquisition partnership and Swiggy

Dubai-based restaurant reservation startup Eat App aims to make India a focal point for its business through a new fundraising, acquisition and partnership with Swiggy to sell a solution to restaurants to collect booking data and grow their business accordingly.

The company said 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. Through this fundraising campaign, Eat App has now raised more than $23 million in funding to date.

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

India’s food service industry is expected to be worth more than $85 billion by 2028, according to industry reports, with dining accounting for more than half of it. Restaurants rely on walk-in and separately manage their bookings from sources like Zomato, Swiggy and EazyDiner.

To expand, Eat App acquired a rival company called ReserveGo, and also partnered with the recently listed food and grocery platform, Swiggy, to sell its restaurant product.

ReserveGo was founded by Vijayan Parthasarathy in 2022. Parthasarathy has a rich history in the restaurant reservation industry. Before ReserveGo, it 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 served more than 1,000 restaurants at the time. Parthasarathy told TechCrunch that the platform has handled an average of 5 million bookings per month over the past 12 months without any downtime.

EatApp has also partnered with Swiggy to market its products to restaurants in order to increase their sales, taking the startup’s total number of restaurants to over 2,000, with over 8 million covers served till the end of the year through various platforms. For comparison, Swiggy’s Dineout platform alone served over 23.8 million covers in 2025.

“There has never been a more exciting time for the restaurant industry in the country, with consumer engagement and constant innovations. We believe access to Eat App’s world-class technology and AI-driven tools will improve restaurant management, and help restaurants across the country deliver a more enjoyable experience to their guests,” Arpit Mathur, vice president of strategy at Swiggy, said in a statement.

The company, which listed in the Indian markets last year, said it has partnered with Eat App to offer a global solution for restaurants to grow their business.

Swiggy and EatApp are marketing this solution as GroMax for India, which includes add-ons like the ability to promote restaurants on Meta and Swiggy, apart from booking management. Although Swiggy does not play a role in product development, its sales team provides inputs to Eat App on potential features it can develop for the market.

Before its expansion into India, the UAE was its largest market, followed by the US, UK and Saudi Arabia.

“Honestly, as we see India, there is a very strong synergy and similarity between what we saw in India. [GCC] The region eight or nine years ago, especially in Dubai, where we were initially, I would say, responsible for building that scaffolding, that layer of technology infrastructure. [for serving restaurants]. We see a lot of similarities in India. [to that]“,” Nizar Kazim, CEO of Eat App, told TechCrunch.

“We hope that whatever efforts are being made in the region in Dubai and where restaurants have the tools today, to help us drive change in India,” he added, “We hope that we can offer the same in India along with local founders like Vijayan and the team.”

India is a market with huge opportunity in the restaurant space. However, for restaurants, the challenge is to attract customers using every possible channel and then collect those reservations in one place. Parthasarathy pointed out that the top 200 restaurants in India are available to customers only through reservation. But for the next few thousand, it’s very much about managing capacity through different channels.

Eat’s growth faces some hurdles. First, there are international competitors like Seven Rooms, TableCheck, and OpenTable, along with local competitors like PetPooja and Posist. Second, some restaurants rely solely on attendance or do not use collection software to obtain data about diners.

Several industry executives who spoke with TechCrunch said reservation aggregator software as a standalone product wouldn’t appeal to restaurant owners. Eat App will need to prove that its growth portfolio provides enough value to restaurants.