Online restaurant ordering and discovery portal Zomato acquired logistics technology startup Sparse Labs, as it looks improve the delivery experience. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Sparse Labs has developed an Android-based mobile application which transmits delivery executives location to both the restaurant and the consumer in real time. This technology will critical as for Zomato as 80% of its delivery orders are fulfilled by restaurants. Main rival Swiggy owns its delivery fleet and is counting on controlling the experience as its differentiator.

“There are some areas that have immense room for improvement, the most significant one being delivery tracking,” said Co-Founder & CEO Deepinder Goyal in a blog post while announcing the acquisition.

The company said that Sparse Labs will be renamed as Zomato Trace, and will given free of cost to restaurants on Zomato’s food delivery network. Zomato added that restaurants also have the option of using “a proprietary GPS tracker developed by Sparse, that can be fitted onto bikes.” 

“At the restaurant end, this technology will help make deliveries highly cost- and time-efficient, allowing them to optimise delivery routes and ensuring minimal wait time for riders. We’ve always maintained that the most cost-efficient delivery fleet is the restaurant’s own, where they can utilise the same staff during off-peak hours for back-of-house and marketing activities,” added Goyal in the blog.

Sparse Labs is a two year old Gurgaon-based startup founded by Pankaj Batra, an engineer from Kurukshetra University who has worked at companies like Educomp Solutions and Studyplaces. The venture has been bootstrapped and counts hyper-local startups and restaurants as clients like Pickmylaundry, Beuno, Qlivery and Spice Labs.

Source: Economic Times