Dubai-based restaurant reservation startup Eat App aims to make India a focal point of its business. This strategy involves new fundraising, an acquisition, and a partnership with Swiggy to sell a solution that helps restaurants aggregate reservation data and grow their business.
The company has raised $10 million in a Series B extension round led by PSG Equity through its portfolio company Zenchef SAS. This amount is larger than the startup’s original Series B round of $6 million in 2022. With this fundraiser, Eat App has now raised over $23 million in total funding.
Eat App has been operating for more than a decade and is present in over 92 countries, serving more than 5,000 restaurants with $12 million in annual recurring revenue. However, India has become a central focus in the last 12 months, with the company scaling to over 2,000 restaurants in the country.
India’s food service industry is set to reach over $85 billion by 2028, with dine-in making up more than half of that market. Restaurants currently rely on walk-ins and separately manage reservations from sources like Zomato, Swiggy, and EazyDiner.
To achieve scale in India, Eat App acquired a rival called ReserveGo and partnered with the food delivery platform Swiggy to upsell its restaurant product. ReserveGo was built by Vijayan Parthasarathy in 2022. Parthasarathy has a history in the reservation industry, having previously built a platform called inResto, which was acquired by Times Internet-owned Dineout in 2015. Swiggy later acquired Dineout in 2022.
Eat App acquired ReserveGo in mid-2025, when it was serving over 1,000 restaurants. Parthasarathy stated that the platform has averaged handling 5 million reservations per month for the last 12 months without any downtime.
The partnership with Swiggy to market its product has taken Eat App’s total restaurant tally in India to over 2,000, with over 8 million covers served through various platforms by the year’s end. For comparison, Swiggy’s Dineout platform alone catered to over 23.8 million covers in 2025.
Swiggy’s Vice President of Strategy, Arpit Mathur, said in a statement that access to Eat App’s technology and AI-driven tools will improve restaurant management and help deliver a more delightful experience to guests.
Swiggy, which was listed on the Indian markets last year, partnered with Eat App to bring a global solution for restaurants to grow their business. The two companies market this solution as GroMax for India. It includes add-ons like the ability to promote restaurants on Meta and Swiggy, in addition to reservation management. While Swiggy is not involved in product development, its sales team provides input to Eat App on potential features for the market.
Before its India expansion, the United Arab Emirates was Eat App’s biggest market, followed by the U.S., the U.K., and Saudi Arabia. The CEO of Eat App, Nezar Kadhem, noted strong similarities between the current opportunity in India and the early market dynamics the company saw in Dubai years ago.
India presents a significant opportunity in the restaurant space. The challenge for restaurants is to attract customers through every possible channel and then collate those reservations in one place. Parthasarathy noted that while the top 200 restaurants in India are primarily reservation-only, for the next several thousand restaurants, it is more about capacity management across different channels.
Eat App’s growth in India faces obstacles. These include international competitors like SevenRooms, TableCheck, and OpenTable, as well as local players like Petpooja and Posist. Additionally, some restaurants rely solely on walk-ins or do not use aggregation software to collect diner data.
Several industry executives stated that a reservation aggregation software as a standalone product may not entice restaurant owners. Eat App will need to demonstrate that its broader growth suite brings sufficient value to restaurants to succeed.