Choco Raises $30.2M in Funding

Choco, a Berlin, Germany-based company focused on simplifying how restaurants order from suppliers, raised $30.2m in funding.

The round was led by Coatue Management with participation from previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Atlantic Labs, Target Global and Greyhound. In conjunction with the funding, Coatue Chairman Dan Rose, a 20-year industry veteran and former senior leader at Facebook, will join Choco’s board of directors, along with Coatue Partner Bennett Siegel.

The company, which has raised a total of $71.5m since 2018, intends to use the funds to expand into new markets and scale its team to 200 employees by the end of the year.

Founded by serial tech entrepreneurs Daniel Khachab, Julian Hammer and Rogerio da Silva Yokomizo, Choco is launching a direct-to-consumer program to link increased consumer demand for groceries delivered to homes, with the excess supply of restaurant-quality, locally-sourced produce from wholesale food suppliers. The company will provide next-day delivery to buyers, with increased sustainability measures as products are sold fresh, locally and with less packaging.

Choco is rolling out this program in all 17 of its global markets (in eight countries that include Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Brazil and the United States), with dedicated direct-to-consumer e-commerce websites set up for suppliers and consumers in each market. The company combines mobile e-commerce tools with a chat app platform to enable restaurant managers and food suppliers to digitally migrate their supply chain operations.

Additionally, as part of this initiative Choco will donate 100% of profits, until restaurants reopen, to regional funds to help local restaurants stay afloat.

Source, FinSMEs, April 17, 2020

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Hungry Raises $20M in Series B Funding

Hungry, an Arlington, VA-based catering marketplace that connects businesses with independent chefs, raised $20m in Series B funding.

The round was led by Evolution VC Partners with participation from Kevin Hart, Jay-Z, Todd Gurley, Reggie Love and Bobby Wagner.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations and its business reach.

Led by CEO Jeff Grass, COO Eman Pahlavani and President Shy Pahlavani, Hungry is a catering marketplace that connects businesses with independent chefs. It provides top chef-prepared office catering for hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of employees at organizations around Atlanta, Georgia, Austin, Texas Boston, Massachusetts, Manhattan, New York, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. Metro Area.

Source. FinSMEs, March 9, 2020

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Just Eat and Takeaway.com merger designed to ward off younger rivals such as Uber Eats

When Alex Canter, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and the fourth-generation proprietor of Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, took over business development operations at his great-grandfather’s restaurant, he quickly became frustrated by the complexity involved in routing orders from multiple food delivery platforms. Fortunately, he met entrepreneur Mike Jacobs, who’d launched a product targeting order fulfillment for stadium concession stands and food trucks. The two cofounders, along with four others, fine-tuned a solution with partners that included Kitchen United and Epson, and in under a year their product and company — Ordermark — graduated from Boulder, Colorado-based accelerator Techstars and grew to more than 25 employees.

Now, months after moving its headquarters to a 7,200-square-foot office in Culver City (while keeping a Denver office), Ordermark is gearing up for growth with a fresh capital infusion. The startup today revealed that it recently closed an $18 million series B funding round led by Foundry Group, with participation from previous investors TenOneTen Ventures, Vertical Venture Partners, Mucker Capital, Act One Ventures, and Nosara Capital. The raise comes after a $9.5 million series A in September 2018 and brings Ordermark’s total raised to over $30 million.

CEO Canter says the funding will fuel the integration of Ordermark’s service with existing restaurant technologies, including point of sale (POS) systems, kitchen display systems, accounting tools, last-mile delivery companies, and more. Additionally, he expects it will lay the groundwork for support of emerging restaurant models, like virtual restaurants.

“I cofounded Ordermark to help my family’s restaurant adapt and thrive in the mobile delivery era and then realized that, as a company, we could help other restaurants experiencing the same challenges. We’ve been gratified to see positive results come in from our restaurant customers nationwide,” said Canter. “So we are thrilled to have the backing of Foundry Group to fuel our growth. We have some incredibly cool innovations in the pipeline and look forward to bringing them to restaurants everywhere.”

For each client, Ordermark develops a strategy and creates a bespoke rollout plan, identifying services to bring on, negotiating rates, setting up marketing strategies, and even designating delivery driver pickup zones. The company supplies ordering hardware in the form of a touchscreen Samsung tablet and custom-designed Epson printer, along with software that integrates well over a dozen delivery providers, including Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash, ChowNow, Caviar, Delivery.com, and popular POS systems like Brink, Dinerware, Positouch, Simphony, and Squirrel.

Hardware is an important piece of Ordermark’s approach, according to Canter. Prior to onboarding, its restaurant customers are often stuck juggling multiple tablets and laptops to field incoming delivery orders. A multitude of printers and disparate checkout workflows exacerbates the problem, particularly at peak times.

The other key to Ordermark’s solution is a dashboard from which restaurant employees can manage multiple platforms (even for restaurants that provide their own delivery drivers) and from which they can reach out directly to a U.S.-based customer care team to change hours, update menus, or even temporarily pause service. This dashboard also affords them access to analytics tools that surface real-time locations and metrics and run reports across all delivery services.

Ordermark’s success has been nothing short of meteoric, with over 3,000 restaurant brands signed on to date including Buffalo Wild Wings, Little Caesars, Sonic, Qdoba, Johnny Rockets, Subway, Popeyes, Papa John’s, Which Which, Moe’s, Togo’s, Pinkberry, Pieology, TGI Fridays, Yogurtland, and Halal Guys. Deployments rose from 20 U.S. states in September 2018 to over 40 today, and Ordermark expects to have customers in all 50 states within months.

Ordermark competes to an extent with Chowly, which similarly integrates third-party ordering platforms with POS systems, and Checkmate, whose tech suite funnels orders directly into restaurants’ POS systems. But Foundry Group partner Chris Moody believes the food delivery market’s current trajectory — from $17 billion in revenue this year to more than $24 billion in 2023, according to Statista — promises great things for Ordermark.

“Foundry Group has a long history of investing in companies that glue together disparate systems over diverse platforms — and that’s exactly what Ordermark is doing in the restaurant industry: connecting third-party ordering solutions, point-of-sale systems, and other cool innovations to help restaurants consolidate, grow, and understand their delivery business,” said Moody. “We were initially introduced to Ordermark via three of our partner funds: Techstars Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures. All three were incredibly excited about what the Ordermark team is building and the tremendous progress they’ve made since their series A investment. The more we got to know Alex and the team, the more we realized what an incredible platform they’re building. Their products work in part because Alex is a fourth-generation restaurant owner and he and his team truly understand the needs of the restaurant."

Source. Venture Beat, Paul Sawers, July 29, 2019

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Restaurant website builder BentoBox raises $16.4M

By Anthony Ha

BentoBox, which helps restaurant owners build mobile-friendly websites, has raised $16.4 million in Series B funding.

This might not seem like the biggest opportunity, particularly because consumers are connecting with restaurants in so many other places online — reading reviews on Yelp, making reservations on OpenTable, ordering delivery on GrubHub and so on — but founder and CEO Krystle Mobayeni said that’s exactly why BentoBox  is important.

“Unfortunately, the technology that has over time become more important in dining out has [also] threatened restaurants’ business models,” Mobayeni told me. “Restaurants have lost that direct relationship with their guests, which is the most important thing in hospitality.”

So BentoBox started out with restaurant websites because it’s “the only place online where they had control,” she said. Since then, it’s also added features allowing those restaurants to push the content and information from their websites to other platforms, like Google and Facebook.

Mobayeni also said that it’s crucial for BentoBox to be a revenue generator for restaurants, rather than just another cost. So it charges a straightforward subscription fee (rather than taking a transaction fee that eats into a restaurant’s already thin margins), and it’s added potential moneymakers to the website platform, like selling gift cards, booking private events and taking orders for catering.In fact, Mobayeni said restaurants are already looking at the catering feature and “wanting to use that as on-demand online ordering.”

“That’s a really easy leap for us to make, because we have a lot of that technology built already,” she said.

BentoBox says it works with more than 4,000 restaurants across all 50 states and in 16 countries, including Union Square Hospitality Group, Eleven Madison Park and José Andrés’ Think Food Group.

The company has now raised a total of $23.6 million, according to Crunchbase. The new round was led by Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ Venture), with participation from Bullpen Capital, Haystack and Female Founders Fund, as well as restaurateur Will Guidara of Make it Nice and Eleven Madison Park.

“Krystle and her team have demonstrated impressive growth driven by their keen sense of how the restaurant industry is evolving as well as a deep understanding for how these customers use technology in their day-to-day operations,” said Threshold’s Chirag Chotalia in a statement.

Besides adding on-demand ordering, Mobayeni said the new funding will allow BentoBox to start working with larger restaurant chains, and to build more features, like a point-of-sale and reservation system for restaurants.

“Really our vision over time is to power every interaction between the restaurant and their guest,” she said. “We want to continue to help restaurants drive revenue through their most popular revenue streams — ordering online and booking — and doing that in a way that the restaurant owns.”

Source. Techcrunch,  Anthony Ha, April 9, 2019

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