Yelp has long been known as the go-to website to find a good place to eat for dinner. Now, Yelp wants to go a step further and start bringing dinner to you.
The company announced on Tuesday it had acquired Eat24, an online food-ordering start-up, for $134 million in cash and stock in Yelp’s latest move to expand its business.
The move is a departure for Yelp, which has long been a platform for online reviews across many industries, including home services and retail stores. Yelp’s main business has been selling advertising bought by local businesses against those reviews without concentrating on one particular category.
Yelp’s growth, however, is starting to slow, and the company is searching for new ways to expand. Yelp actually reported a decrease in regular visitors in its most recent quarter, including declining use of the company’s mobile app. Currently, Yelp says it has 135 million regular monthly visitors.
In a statement, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s chief executive, said the purchase would help Yelp customers more easily transact with the businesses they’re interested in online. Eat24, which is based in San Bruno, Calif., provides food ordering service to about 20,000 restaurants across the United States.
But Yelp will have to fight others for its growth. GrubHub, an online food ordering company and long-time competitor of Eat24, acquired DiningIn and Restaurants on the Run, two delivery services that bring food directly to customers who order it through the company. The company also faces start-ups like Postmates, which lets customers order food from virtually any restaurant for delivery, as well as Square, which recently bought the food delivery start-up Caviar.
Bigger competitors may be coming, too. Amazon and Google have experimented with on-demand delivery services, and Uber, the ride-hailing start-up, has signaled its own ambitions of becoming a way to deliver anything to anyone.
Shares of Yelp rose about 6 percent, to $44.83, on Tuesday after news of the acquisition was announced.