Burrp! was touted as India’s answer to Yelp and one of the India’s oldest foodtech startup.
Founders Deap Ubhi and Anand Jain returned from the US after working for Motorola and AT&T. They had seen the dotcom bust in the US and found that India was slowly opening itself up to businesses led by tech innovation. They went ahead with their idea anyway and created Burrp in 2006 —the very first website in India that gave users the option of looking for the best user-rated restaurants, cafés, and bars in a neighbourhood they wanted. Burrp was doing well. The company competed with other restaurant discovery portals like Yelp and Zomato. In 2009, Burrp had a strong market share in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Mumbai, because it was where it started, and Bengaluru because it was the IT capital of the country, and a larger number of people were comfortable with the idea of going online to get the information they wanted. Network18 acquired the startup via its subsidiary Infomedia18 for Rs 4.5 crore in 2009, after which Ubhi and Jain left the company to open their own ventures. The company then had some top-level management changes from 2010 to 2014. After Network18’s sale to Reliance Industries in 2014, Burrp was re-launched with a new management led by RIL in October 2015. In August 2016, Burrp had a tie up with Times Internet’s Dine Out for allowing users to reserve tables via website and app. In July 2017, Online ticket booking portal BookMyShow has acquired restaurant search and discovery platform Burrp in an all-cash deal from its parent company Network 18, as a slump sale, for Rs 6.7 lakhs.
