Burrp looking at revenue of Rs 150 crore by March 2019

Food and restaurant recommendation platform Burrp aims to garner revenues of Rs 150 crore by March 2019 as it expands services like events and offers a more personalised search experience to users.
The food-tech company, which competes with the likes of Zomato, is also aiming to facilitate transactions worth Rs 1,000 crore through its platform in the same period.
"Burrp earlier led the industry but then things didn't go as per plan. One of the errors was to become a listings platform for everything... Cut to 2015, we have revamped our product with enhanced features like dish discovery, an events section and trending restaurants," Burrp co-business head Abhishek Chhajlani told PTI.

These additional features will make it easier for users to search for their favourite food or restaurants, he added.
Burrp was acquired by Infomedia, part of Network18, in 2009.
"We have made a lot of changes in the way we operate. We are using artificial intelligence to power our platform to map user behaviour and suggest restaurants they would want to visit or order from. The personalisation feature will roll in from the next update," he said.

Burrp's Co-business head Pradeep Prabhu added that the company is now looking at a topline of Rs 150 crore and a gross merchandise value of Rs 1,000 crore by March 2019.

"Though the numbers are small currently, we are growing at a steady pace... We had a 'New Year's Eve' event and we saw a huge response to that, we are looking at scaling up the events section.
"Also, we will help customers with online ordering but we will not get into deliveries as some of our competitors," Prabhu added.
The company, which earlier had listings from 42 cities, has now reduced it to 15. It has about 6,00,000 mobile installs and one million active users.
"We are extremely focused and instead of being present all over, we would rather have the best offering in select cities... We are aiming for 5-8 million installs in the next three years," Prabhu said.

In 2014 and 2015, around 55 food technology start-ups raised USD 373 million (Rs 2,450 crore) from investors like Rocket Internet and Sequoia Capital, according to data compiled by Tracxn, a Bengaluru-based analyst firm that tracks startups.
However, many analysts believe funding may be drying up in the food-tech sector as many startups burned up investor cash in order to offer economically unviable discounts to get more customers on board.
Several food-tech startups are now reeling under financial pressure to control these costs, while some have been forced to either shut shop, tweak businesses or reduce staff.