Zomato takes over Sparse Lab to improve its delivery experience

In order to give boost to its delivery experience, Zomato, online restaurant ordering and delivery portal, has acquired Sparse Lab. Both the companies have decline to share the financial details of the acquisition deal.

As per the deal, Sparse Lab will share its newly designed system with Zomato that enables both restaurant and consumers to track the locations of the delivery executives while he is on the move. The entire system can be operated through a mobile making it handy and easy to use. This technology will be critical for Zomato as 80 per cent of its delivery orders are fulfilled by restaurants.

Speaking about the move, Deepinder Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO stated in his blog that there are some areas that have immense room for improvement, the most significant one being delivery tracking. Revealing further on the story, company informed 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, Goyal’s blog stated further.

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.