CarToq Acquires Food-Tech Platform Ketchupp

CarToq, India’s fastest growing automobile platform, with current reach of over 25 million unique audiences every month, today announced the acqui-hire of Ketchupp, a Delhi-based food tech start-up and meta search engine for online food ordering. This deal will witness key assets of Ketchupp including its employees, technology know-how and existing partnerships being absorbed by CarToq.

Founded in 2015, Ketchupp is a food discovery platform, which helps users discover best food in their city basis preferences such as healthy, gourmet etc. With an active user base of over 3 Mn users, Ketchupp has active marketing partnerships with leading FMCG & online grocery brands such as Nestle, Quaker Oats, Epigamia, BIRA, Faasos, Grofers and restaurants across 9 cities.

Post the acqui-hire by CarToq, Ketchupp will leverage its brand solutions capabilities to offer solutions at scale to automobile OEMs. The enhanced CarToq team will aggressively roll out new offerings in brand solutions including a new content engine that will help brands formulate content marketing strategies based on audience and content consumption patterns online.

This acquisition comes on the back of CarToq’s recently launched new division, CarToq Studios aimed at delivering content and brand solutions to automobile brands. Ketchupp will be a part of this new business division under the leadership of Chirag Taneja, Co-Founder, Ketchupp, who will take on the responsibility of heading CarToq Studios along with product and strategy at CarToq.

The acquisition of Ketchupp is in line with CarToq’s vision to provide comprehensive brand solutions besides advertising solutions to its brand partners. Commenting on the acqui-hire, Nitin Srivastava, CEO, CarToq said: “Brand and content marketing solutions at scale are rapidly becoming a solution of choice amongst automobile brands and the team at Ketchupp is filled with brand experts. We are thrilled to have Ketchupp on board and collaborate to launch a slew of innovative brand solutions, leveraging the team’s competencies. Going forward, CarToq aims to become a one-stop shop for marketers, with added capabilities such as influencer marketing, video marketing etc. and we intend to build this by acquiring the right teams and talent”.

Commenting on the move, Ketchupp Co-Founder Chirag Taneja said, “Merging with CarToq brings about lot synergies for the two brands as we have complimentary revenue streams. Ketchupp has been delivering high-impact brand solutions to FMCG brands for almost two years now. While, FMCG brands were one of the early adopters of content marketing and native advertising, marketers in other verticals are also warming up to the idea. CarToq has a large audience base and we intend to offer cutting-edge, high-impact content-driven brand solutions to automobile brands. We would also add tech and consumer experience capabilities through the Ketchupp team.”

“With this acqui-hire, CarToq is adding expertise to diversify revenue streams and capabilities to become the largest player in the automobiles category in India. CarToq Studios is expected to add 20% to the top-line in the next 12 months. As marketers focus on solutions beyond Press Release advertising, we believe brand solutions will account for over 35% of our overall revenues over the next 2 years.” added Nitin Srivastava CarToq has been growing at an aggressive growth rate of 20% every quarter and selling over 200mn impressions monthly. Over the last 18 months, CarToq has become the largest engagement platform for automobile owners and enthusiasts and aims to reach an audience base of over 30mn before the end of 2018. CarToq recently launched its Hindi platform for auto enthusiasts and buyers in tier II and III cities in the country. Given the increased interest from tier II and III cities in India, CarToq plans to launch more vernacular content platforms later this year.