Zomato gains up to 83% in Mumbai Trading debut

Zomato raised $1.3 billion from investors including Morgan Stanley and Fidelity Investments in the share sale last week.

The shares jumped as much as 83% and traded at 136.90 rupees as of 10:11 a.m. in Mumbai Friday. (REUTERS)

Indian online food-delivery and restaurant platform Zomato Ltd. surged in its trading debut, setting the stage for a plethora of unicorns to follow the service with initial public offerings.

The shares jumped as much as 83% and traded at 136.90 rupees as of 10:11 a.m. in Mumbai Friday, compared with the IPO price of 76 rupees. Zomato raised $1.3 billion from investors including Morgan Stanley and Fidelity Investments in the share sale last week.

Zomato is leading several consumer-technology startups waiting to publicly trade shares in India, including the parent of digital-payments service Paytm, which has filed for the country's biggest IPO at $2.2 billion. The listing caps a busy first half for domestic listings as local indexes hover near record highs, buoyed by cash injections by central banks worldwide.

The consumer-tech sector is relatively underrepresented in Indian public markets, compared with 30% market capitalization among the 100 biggest listed firms in the U.S. and China, according to Rakhi Prasad, an investment manager with Alder Capital. “It's a new dawn for the consumer tech businesses in the listed space,” she said.