Zomato froze Wings, its restaurant-funding marketplace, nine months after launch

Zomato is India's food-delivery and restaurant-discovery platform.

Zomato could be the intermediary matching restaurants and cloud kitchens with equity investors, monetising its network beyond food delivery.

Zomato launched Zomato Wings in November 2021 as an intermediary platform for restaurant equity financing. Its blog imagined a flywheel: more investors attract more restaurants, creating 'a win-win for restaurants and investors, and by extension, for Zomato!'

An earlier 2021 pilot with revenue-based-financing platforms (GetVantage, Klub, Velocity) had already been scrapped within three months — the market seemed small, and Zomato failed to filter restaurants by minimum criteria or market the new instrument. By April 2022, with the funding winter shooing away investors, Wings' activities were put on hold.

Wings stayed halted as of 12 August 2022. Inc42 noted a possibility of restart later that year, but Zomato stopped answering questions about how much funding Wings had facilitated or whether it still operated.

Zomato claimed Wings had no P&L correlation, yet still froze it — in a downturn, attention is the first budget cut.

The failed RBF pilot showed finance marketplaces need specialist muscle in filtering and marketing that a food-delivery company hadn't built.

A two-sided marketplace with institutional investors on one side is hostage to the funding cycle; delivery orders are not.

Marketplace flywheels need both sides to show up; a flywheel powered by cheap capital stalls the day capital gets expensive — and attention dries up with it.

Zomato kept its focus on profitability and quick commerce: Blinkit's investment guidance was cut to $320M from $400M, consolidated losses narrowed to INR 186 Cr in the June quarter, and the CFO targeted company-level adjusted-EBITDA breakeven no later than the September 2023 quarter. Wings remained halted.