Personalized food recommendation engine Dishq announced today that it has rebranded as Spoonshot, and that the company has acquired India-based startup, Brisky.
During a phone interview, Spoonshot CEO Kishan Vasani told The Spoon that there were a couple of reasons for the re-branding. First, everyone outside of India pronounced the company’s name wrong (present company included). Evidently you weren’t supposed to pronounce the “q” in Dishq — it was supposed to be said “dishk.”
On a more serious note, the new moniker is also a clever, food-base play on “moonshot,” the big, bold initiatives ambitious companies undertake. Vasani said the name better reflects his startup’s mission. “We’re not a one product company,” Vasani said.
To that end, Spoonshot announced today that it has acquired fellow India-based startup Brisky (terms of the deal were not disclosed). Brisky provides restaurants with a way to gather feedback from consumers in a private, real-time way. Participating restaurants can ask customers to opt-in to use Brisky. If customers do, they receive a text message with a link to a mobile browser where they can rate their experience at that restaurant directly to the establishment, rather than just blasting it out on social media.
Brisky also allows restaurants to check in on customers via SMS mid-meal to see how things are going. This may seem strange for U.S. restaurant goers, but Vasani said that handing over a phone number to a restaurant is more common in India.
The Brisky team will continue to operate independently and will scale that product (it’s in 100 locations in India), but it will also provide another data pipeline to feed Spoonshot’s algorithms. As we’ve written before, Spoonshot is a B2B service that combines behavioral and food science data into its machine learning platform to predict what food you will like. Spoonshot’s service can be embedded into places like self-serve restaurant kiosks or even food delivery apps. Getting direct personal customer sentiment about meals via Brisky will help enhance Spoonshot’s recommendations. Spoonshot will be piloting Brisky up in Canada next before it makes its way down to the U.S.
Based in Bengaluru, India, Dishq Spoonshot has raised $560,000 in venture funding and has just completed it’s run at TechStars Farm to Fork accelerator.
Leave a Reply