Popmenu, a digital marketing and ordering platform for restaurants, announced today that it has raised a $65 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from new investor Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Bedrock Capital, Base10 and Felicis Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Popmenu to $87.1 million.
Popmenu’s online suite of tools allow restaurants to build their own branded websites, with dynamic, interactive menus. Restaurants can also coordinate delivery or pickup, enable customer reviews and generate follow-up digital marketing promotions. Popmenu also offers a contactless ordering software package (something made more important by the pandemic) that allows guests to scan a QR code with their smartphone to view and order off of restaurant menus.
During the pandemic last year, when dining rooms were shut down, the restaurant industry turned to delivery and takeout to stay alive. The easiest way to do that was to join up with a third-party delivery service like Uber Eats or DoorDash. But that easy path to delivery came at the cost of handing over both the customer relationship (i.e., ordering and sales data) and the ability to control branding. Some restaurant tech companies even went as far as calling the pandemic “a wakeup call” for restaurants around where, how, and by whom their data gets accessed.
As an alternative to delivery marketplaces, Popmenu bills itself as a tool restaurants can use to control the customer’s journey from the time that person lands on the person’s website to the time they click the order button and their credit card is charged.
This rebuilding of direct relationships between restaurants and consumers is something many software services tout nowadays, with everyone from Toast, Square, Olo, and other offering some form of direct ordering capability. Squarespace’s recent acquisition of hospitality management platform Tock will likely add more competition to this space, too.
At the same time, however, delivery services themselves are bringing their own “commission-free” ordering platforms to market. Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats have all announced some version of this concept in a bid to keep restaurants (and their data) firmly entrenched in their own ecosystems.
For its part, Popmenu says it will use the new funding to accelerate the development of its Popmenu Max, which bulks up its all-in-one solution with some AI-powered features.
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