(By Shashidhar KJ & Vikas SN) Online restaurant listing company Zomato has acquired IAC's Urbanspoon to enter the important US market. The company had earlier forayed into North America by launching in Canada in October last year. Info Edge, which owns majority stake in Zomato, has informed BSE (pdf) that Zomato acquired Urban Spoon in an all-cash transaction for $52 million. Its worth noting that Zomato had earlier raised $60 million co-led by new investor Vy Capital and existing investor Info Edge with participation from Sequoia Capital in November 2014. Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said that they have spent the majority of this investment on this acquisition. Urbanspoon was earlier bought by IAC for an undisclosed amount in 2009, however, few years later, the company had to scale back its operations as it changed its advertising models, which led to job layoffs in 2012 and 2013. Post acquisition, most of Urbanspoon's team will be joining Zomato and the company will be integrating its website and mobile apps to Zomato over the next few months. The company also seems to be looking for more people to drive their operations, with the report saying that Zomato currently has 200 job listings across cities in the United States. While Zomato's US foray has been on the cards for quite some time, it looks like the company has sped up its plans. Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah had earlier told TechCrunch that they were looking to enter the US markets in the second half of 2015. Interestingly, during the Info Edge earnings conference call in November, Info Edge founder and vice chairman Sanjeev Bikhchandani…
