17 years after being founded, Zomato is changing its name.
Zomato’s board has approved the renaming of the company to “Eternal”. Eternal will hold under it different brands like Zomato, Blinkit, Hyperpure, District and others. Zomato’s ticker on the stock exchanges will also change to ETERNAL.
“When we acquired Blinkit, we started using “Eternal” (instead of Zomato) internally to distinguish between the company and the brand/app,” said Deepinder Goyal in a letter filed with the BSE. “We also thought that we would publicly rename the company to Eternal, the day something beyond Zomato became a significant driver of our future. Today, with Blinkit, I feel we are there. We would like to rename Zomato Ltd., the company (not the brand/app), to Eternal Ltd,” he added.
“Eternal is a powerful name, and to be honest, it scares me to my core. It is a tall order to live up to. Because ‘Eternal’ carries both a promise and a paradox,” Goyal added in his letter. “This isn’t just a name change; it is a mission statement. A reminder etched into our identity that we will endure — not because we are here, but because we need to get there.”
Zomato’s decision to change its name once it ended up creating many different brands has precedent in the tech space. In 2015, Google had changed its name to Alphabet, which became the holding company for its different brands. Similarly, Facebook had renamed itself to Meta in 2021, and had become the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
Zomato, too, has gone through a similar evolution. The company had started off named FoodieBay in 2008, but had renamed itself as Zomato within a few years of being founded. Zomato had then evolved from a restaurant listing and review platform to a food delivery service in 2015. A few years later, it had launched Hyperpure, which delivered food to restaurants. Most crucially, Zomato had acquired Blinkit in 2022 to build its grocery delivery arm. Last year, Zomato had launched its events and ticketing platform District. Zomato clearly believes that all these brands can no longer lie under the Zomato name — Blinkit, for instance, is already thought to be more valuable than Zomato by some stock market analysts. Zomato has thus renamed its parent company to Eternal, much like other tech companies. But ‘Eternal’ is quite a tall order — no companies and empires have managed to indefinitely stand the test of time, but Zomato would like to keep striving to make sure its business runs for as long as it possibly can.