Eat App wants a bite of India’s restaurant reservation business with an acquisition and Swiggy partnership

Dubai-based restaurant reservation startup Eat App is setting its sights firmly on India as a core growth market, backed by fresh funding, an acquisition, and a strategic partnership with Swiggy. The company plans to offer Indian restaurants a unified solution that combines reservation data from multiple sources and provides aggregated insights to help them grow their businesses.

Eat App said it has raised $10 million in a Series B extension round led by PSG Equity through its portfolio company Zenchef SAS. The new capital raise is notably larger than Eat App’s original $6 million Series B round completed in 2022. With this extension, the company’s total funding has crossed $23 million to date.

Founded more than a decade ago, Eat App operates in over 92 countries and serves more than 5,000 restaurants globally, generating around $12 million in annual recurring revenue. Over the past year, however, India has emerged as a significant focus area. During the last 12 months alone, the company has scaled its footprint in the country to more than 2,000 restaurants.

India’s food services sector is expected to surpass $85 billion by 2028, according to industry estimates, with dine-in accounting for more than half of the market. Many restaurants currently depend heavily on walk-ins while managing reservations separately across platforms such as Zomato, Swiggy, and EazyDiner, creating operational complexity and fragmented data.

To accelerate its expansion, Eat App acquired a competing platform, ReserveGo, and entered into a partnership with Swiggy, which was listed on Indian stock exchanges last year, to upsell its restaurant management solution.

ReserveGo was founded in 2022 by Vijayan Parthasarathy, a veteran of the restaurant reservation space. Before launching ReserveGo, Parthasarathy built inResto in 2014, which was acquired a year later by Times Internet-owned Dineout. Swiggy acquired Dineout from Times Internet in 2022.

Eat App completed the acquisition of ReserveGo in mid-2025, when the platform was serving more than 1,000 restaurants. Speaking to TechCrunch, Parthasarathy said ReserveGo has consistently handled an average of 5 million reservations per month over the past year without any downtime.

Alongside the acquisition, Eat App partnered with Swiggy to promote and upsell its product to restaurants. This collaboration has helped push Eat App’s total restaurant count in India beyond 2,000, with more than 8 million covers served by the end of the year through multiple platforms. By comparison, Swiggy’s Dineout platform alone handled more than 23.8 million covers in 2025.

“There has never been a more exciting time for the restaurant industry in the country, with steady consumer uptake and ongoing innovation,” said Arpit Mathur, vice president of strategy at Swiggy, in a statement. He added that access to Eat App’s technology and AI-driven tools could significantly enhance restaurant operations and guest experiences across India.

Swiggy said it partnered with Eat App to introduce a global-grade solution designed to help restaurants grow and manage their businesses more effectively. The joint offering is marketed in India under the name GroMax. It includes features such as reservation management as well as add-ons that allow restaurants to promote themselves on Meta and Swiggy. While Swiggy does not participate directly in product development, its sales team provides market feedback and feature suggestions to Eat App.

Before shifting its focus to India, Eat App’s most significant market was the United Arab Emirates, followed by the U.S., the U.K., and Saudi Arabia.

“There’s a strong similarity between what we’re seeing in India today and what we experienced in the GCC region eight or nine years ago, especially in Dubai, where we helped build the foundational tech infrastructure for restaurants,” said Nezar Kadhem, CEO of Eat App, in an interview with TechCrunch. He added that the company hopes to replicate that progress in India by working alongside local founders such as Parthasarathy and his team.

India offers significant opportunities for restaurant technology providers, but it also presents challenges. Restaurants need to attract customers across multiple channels and consolidate reservation data into a single system. Parthasarathy noted that while the top 200 restaurants in India primarily operate on reservations, the next tier of thousands of restaurants focuses more on managing capacity across diverse platforms.

Eat App faces competition from global players such as SevenRooms, TableCheck, and OpenTable, as well as domestic companies including Petpooja and Posist. Additionally, many restaurants continue to rely primarily on walk-ins or choose not to use reservation aggregation tools at all.

Several industry executives told TechCrunch that reservation aggregation alone may not be compelling enough for restaurant owners. As a result, Eat App will need to demonstrate that its broader growth and management suite delivers clear, tangible value to restaurants in the Indian market.