OpenTable Devours FoodSpotting for $10 Million in Cash

OpenTable has acquired Foodspotting, the popular photo-sharing application for restaurants.

Screen Shot 2013-01-28 at 8.49.44 PMThe online reservations company said it paid about $10 million in cash for the company, making it a pretty good deal for the startup, which raised $3.75 million over its three-year existence.

Matt Roberts, OpenTable’s CEO, said it originally partnered with Foodspotting a year ago to add some of its photos to its mobile application, but “we had a such a shared passion for restaurants, we wanted an opportunity to work closely together as one team.”

As the name of the app suggests, Foodspotting allows people to look for restaurant recommendations by sifting through photos of dishes shot by other customers. Today, the app has three million photos in its catalog of dishes from crepes to cupcakes.

Roberts said that the Foodspotting app will continue to exist, and that users can make OpenTable reservations from within the app, but “the more deeper integration will happen in the other direction,” he said.

In October, OpenTable started getting more serious about mobile by giving restaurants the tools to optimize their sites for the smaller screen to support making reservations over mobile. The images and photography will be used by OpenTable’s restaurants to illustrate their menus. There are 15,000 OpenTable restaurants on the Foodspotting app.

Ten of Foodspotting’s employees will join OpenTable, including CEO and co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski, who will become OpenTable’s lead user interface designer.

Investors in Foodspotting include BlueRun Ventures, Felicis Ventures, High Line Ventures, 500 Startups and Zelkova Ventures, plus angel investor Dave Morin.

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