Yelp Buys Food-Ordering Service Eat24 To Compete With Seamless

Yelp wants to be the center of your food universe. Last year, Yelp launched an online reservation service, and now the restaurant review company has just acquired Eat24, a food ordering service, for $134 million to place itself in direct competition with the Seamless/GrubHub giant.

Yelp had already dabbled in food ordering with the launch of Yelp Platform in 2013, which allows customers to order takeout from New York City and San Francisco restaurants directly on Yelp. Now ordering food via Yelp will be expanded even more with Eat24, which works with 20,000 restaurants in over 1,500 cities around the US. Yelp also plans to expand Eat24's services to include its more than one million listed restaurants. A recent Yelp blog post stated that the company's "online booking and ordering partners will continue as Platform partners," meaning that Platform won't be phased out in favor of Eat24.

"As more food ordering transactions move online, further integrating Eat24 will enhance our user experience with an easy-to-use product and service that allows our large consumer audience to transact directly with businesses," said Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp's CEO and one of The Daily Meal's most powerful people in food, in a statement. "Eat24 has developed a great solution and unique service that has already added great value to the Yelp Platform. With this acquisition, we gain more tools and expertise to help engage our users from discovery through transaction in a key vertical for Yelp."