Salam Planet a venture backed leading lifestyle app for Muslims, has acquired Halal Dining Club.
Salam Planet has nearly 200.000 registered users across in Denmark, Pakistan & UK and the acquisition opens up its growing presence in the UK and Asia. Halal Dining Club was launched in 2016 providing an innovative app allowing halal diners to find, review, book restaurant
s and earn loyalty rewards in one place. It’s 4500 strong curated restaurant database spans 10 cities including London, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok and New York with an online weekly reach of 1 million users across it’s platforms.
Commenting on the acquisition, Omair Khan, Founder and CEO of Salam Planet, said
“We are excited to add Halal Dining Club to our portfolio of services. Halal Dining Club shares our vision of bringing greater convenience to halal diners and improving the restaurant discovery and booking experience. We value the users desire to discover great halal restaurants in a convenient and reliable manner, many of whom we hope will become life-long users. Halal Dining Club makes discovery of halal restaurants easier, allowing restaurants to efficiently capitalize on online booking and ordering, all with a compelling user experience.”
Copenhagen-based Promentum Equity Partners, the VC behind Salam Planet commented, “The opportunity in the digital Islamic Economy is huge and relatively untapped. The combination of Salam Planet’s strength in attracting Muslim lifestyle users to the platform and Halal Dining Club’s proposition into the dining space creates a stronger consumer proposition and will bring Salam Planet one step closer to delivering on it’s vision to create a global social media lifestyle platform and marketplace addressing Muslim communities.”
“Joining Salam Planet is an important step forward for Halal Dining Club. Salam Planet’s vision for creating a broader lifestyle app for Muslims aligned perfectly with our own expansion model in providing even greater value to halal consumers as well as merchants targeting this fast growing consumer base. Salam Planet through its multi-category platform and venture backing are well placed to lead the charge on moving closer to becoming the largest global brand serving the halal consumer,” said Siddika Jaffer, Founder & CEO of Halal Dining Club .
The terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed. Siddika Jaffer will continue to work with Salam Planet in an advisory capacity to help deliver the shared vision.
Consolidation in Islamic sector
Founder of Halal Dining Club Siddika Jaffer told Arabian Business: “This acquisition definitely represents the start of consolidation trends in the Islamic economy sector.
“Individual entrepreneurs have been moved by similar problems across different country markets to come up with fairly similar solutions, such as a halal restaurant finder app or an e-commerce platform.
“Whilst start-ups may have had some traction in each market, in order to grow and scale, there is a need to consolidate while maintaining the unique insights gleaned in each disparate market.”
Jaffer predicted that British modest fashion and halal travel sectors would see more consolidation in the coming years.
She said: “From a consumer perspective, increased affluence and a young millennial tech-savvy user base continue to provide good market conditions for startups.
“For start-ups, the difficulty remains determining how to scale when serving fragmented user bases across several country markets. I refer specifically to startups targeting users in Western markets where mainstream players do not naturally cater for the specific nuanced needs of Muslim consumers.”
