Indian media giant gobbles up restaurant booking startup to merge with online food portal

Times Internet, the online subsidiary of The Times of India Group, is expanding its web empire yet again today. The media giant announced this morning it has acquired the restaurant reservations startup Dineout, which covers a number of restaurants in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai.

Dineout had previously partnered up with Times Internet’s TimesCity, a web portal for restaurant and venue reviews and listings, to add in restaurant bookings. That partnership has now been formalized with this buy-out. The financial terms of the acquisition haven’t been revealed.

Growing web empire

Dineout claims to have made reservations for 200,000 diners in the two years since it started up.

TimesCity now covers listings, reviews, bookings, and also online food ordering. That makes the massive web portal a challenger to listings sites like Zomato as well as the online food ordering service Foodpanda.

(See: India’s Zomato gets $37M funding led by Sequoia Capital to challenge Yelp in more markets)

Times Internet has been on a buying spree in the past couple of years as it grows the web empire. Most recently, the media group acquired Musicfellas, an online marketplace for indie artists to sell their songs, to augment its existing music streaming service, Gaana.