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Bbot

March 1, 2022

Q&A: The Spoon Talks With DoorDash’s Tom Pickett About Why The Delivery Giant Acquired Bbot

Earlier today, DoorDash announced they had acquired Bbot, a maker of order & pay software solutions. We sat down with DoorDash’s chief revenue officer Tom Pickett to hear about the thinking behind the deal. Answers have been edited slightly for clarity.

What motivated you to do this acquisition?

We’ve been watching this space over the course of the last year, and we’ve seen it evolve from this contactless solution to something that we feel is going to be a core part of what restaurants use going forward. In a similar way, online ordering wasn’t that big of a thing before COVID, but as COVID happened and digital commerce started to become a more important thing for the restaurant, we accelerated efforts and built our Storefront product and that’s now part of the arsenal for any restaurant. And so we think the same thing is starting to happen with digital ordering. I’d say we’re still in the early side of that, but we see the same trends, and we want to get ahead of it and make that easy for restaurants to be able to adopt.

Do you plan to sunset the Bbot name and replace that with DoorDash eventually?

We haven’t made final decisions on that yet, so for now, it’s still Bbot.

Anyone who’s gone into a restaurant with any degree of frequency over the past six months has had the option to pay at the table. That just seems like it’s the frequency that is just going up and up and it makes it much more convenient for the customer. I think the waiter is probably pretty happy with that as well.

From the waitstaff perspective, Bbot has told us that there’s more leverage in the model. So waiters can handle more tables and, in the end, that translates to more tips. So the waitstaff generally is happy with this type of solution. The restaurant management staff is generally happy because they can handle more demand.

And what we’ve also found is that customers tend to order more when they have access to a digital solution. That could be just because of the latency of having to wait for a waiter, and if the customer wants to order that extra drink, they can just go ahead and pull it up on their phone and order that. But the ticket size tends to go up with a digital solution.

What will (Bbot CEO) Steve Simoni’s role be post-acquisition?

Steve will be joining our product organization and he will be leading our digital in-store solutions that we continue to build. The first step is we want to integrate the Bbot solution into our broader technology stack. He’ll be driving that. And this will become part of our broader suite; if you think about Storefront, plus digital online, plus a digital in-store ordering solution, we want to make that integrated and easy to onboard and sell into our broader base of restaurants.

You are responsible from a sales perspective for both Bbot and Chowbotics (the bowl food robotics startup DoorDash acquired last year). While these are obviously very different products, they are both a part of an effort by DoorDash to diversify its product offering. Do you see any similarities between these two businesses?

On one hand, they both have to do with efficiency. The digital in-store solution is an efficiency lever, but it’s also a great customer experience addition as well. So it’s really the combination. Restaurants are learning how to operate more efficiently and the Bbot solution definitely helps in that regard. Chowbotics, on the one hand, can be an efficiency lever, if you think about Chowbotics as a back of store model, but the other side of robotics is a front of store model where we put that out to expand the footprint so it’s really more of a sales growth model.

Do you think we’re going to start seeing more of these types of acquisitions, not necessarily from DoorDash, but across the landscape?

I think we already are seeing some of that. Just look across some of the recent announcements, I think we’re early in the ecosystem. A lot of technology players out there, so I think there’s going to be a natural evolution, one way or the other through acquisitions, some of those technologies are just not going to make it over time.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

March 1, 2022

DoorDash Acquires In-Venue Order & Pay Specialist Bbot

Food delivery giant DoorDash announced today they have entered into an agreement to buy Bbot, a New York-based maker of order and pay software for restaurants. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Bbot, which offers a suite of off-premise and in-venue ordering solutions, is best known for its in-venue QR code offering that allows customers to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items with their phones. The company has seen rapid growth over the past couple of years as restaurants raced to upgrade their digital ordering capabilities and install contactless payment solutions during the pandemic. The company’s fast growth led to not one but two funding rounds in 2021 and was enough to convince Doordash to scoop up the company.

For DoorDash, which launched its restaurant e-commerce platform DoorDash Storefront in 2020, the BBot deal helps expand its digital suite to include payment and in-venue offerings.

“We’re excited to bring our combined suite to an even wider selection of merchants across the hospitality space – including bars, hotels, and ghost kitchens – so these businesses can engage with more customers, increase their quality of service, and grow sales,” said Tom Pickett, DoorDash’s Chief Revenue Officer, in the release.

The Bbot deal is the latest in a string of recent acquisitions for DoorDash. The company moved into Europe with an $8 billion acquisition of Wolt late last year, and before that, acquired robot bowl-food maker Chowbotics.

For Bbot, today’s news marks the culmination of a journey that started with building a robotic beer delivery system on the ceiling of a bar. The company added QR code ordering as almost an afterthought to enable customers to order beer delivered via the conveyor belt.

“After launching in January of 2018, the next place was like ‘I’ll take all of it except the robots,'” said Bbot CEO Steve Simoni in an interview with The Spoon last year. “That was March of 2018. From there, we pivoted fully into that.”

December 9, 2021

Podcast: Talking Ghost Kitchens, Food Robots & Metaverse With Bbot’s Steve Simoni

Welcome to our new podcast, The Restaurant Tech Variety Hour.

Ok, so it’s really just the same old Spoon podcast. But for now, we’ll change the name because this week we’re all about restaurant tech. I’m joined by Bbot CEO Steve Simoni to catch up on everything that’s going on in the restaurant technology universe, from delivery & digitization, to ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants, food robots, and even the metaverse!

As always, you can find The Spoon podcast in Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can just click play below.

November 1, 2021

Restaurants, Welcome to the Metaverse

Restaurants, welcome to the metaverse.

It’s not just a vision that’s 5 or 10 years away. It’s here now. 

For Halloween, Chipotle created a virtual restaurant inside the online game platform Roblox to give away $1 million in free burritos. Fans and gamers could enter the restaurant, experience a Halloween-themed Chipotle, and get a promo code for a free burrito in the real world.

This is a preview of what we can expect to see in the years to come. The next generation of diners will order their food and discover where they are going for their next night out from inside augmented and virtual worlds created by the likes of Epic, Roblox, and Facebook. And the best hospitality companies (and hospitality tech companies) will not wait too long to adapt.

Here are seven ways that restaurants will change in the metaverse:

  1. Marketplaces – apps won’t be the primary ordering channel anymore once more people begin to participate in the metaverse. Companies like Doordash, UberEats and GrubHub will need to rethink their strategy as ordering and discovery will be embedded in more interoperable experiences. Doordash moving to become a pure logistics API is smart because they will be protected if they lose the ordering portal in the metaverse — someone still has to deliver the food after all.
  2. Marketing – brands will start integrating food into virtual experiences. Instead of traditional email marketing, restaurants will be able to recreate their physical space in the metaverse and invite guests from around the world. The metaverse will create new opportunities to test promotions and loyalty programs, just like Chipotle showed by launching their Boorito promo as digital-only this year.
  3. Reservations – the interface for booking a table will completely change. Diners will do a quick virtual tour before booking the specific table they want. Pricing will be dynamic for the very best tables.
  4. Delivery – ghost kitchens will be the building blocks of group ordering in the metaverse. You’ll be able to share a meal with your friends delivered to you at the same time even if you are halfway across the globe.
  5. QR codes – QR codes will be more than just menus. They will be the access point for augmented reality. Friends from the metaverse who can’t make the night out will be able to join in on the fun and send your party a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
  6. Payments – while we expect restaurants to always take dollars, we think the metaverse will have a few different major cryptocurrencies that rise to the top over the next 5 years. The currency that a restaurant accepts will be part of its identity and marketing efforts.
  7. Membership – members-only hospitality experiences like SOHO house will extend their house into the digital realm. Members will have access to exclusive digital worlds if they own the right (non-fungible token) NFT to get in the front door. These NFTs will be traded on open marketplaces as keys to different clubs.

Most of us love sitting down with friends at a restaurant with a chill vibe and having a great conversation in the real world. The metaverse will not change that. Restaurants will continue to provide those unique experiences. But within the metaverse, restaurants will be able to reach more guests that might not always be able to show up in person.

Steve Simoni is CEO of BBot, a maker of smart ordering technology for restaurants and the hospitality industry.

September 1, 2021

Steve Simoni Hated Walking to the Bar to Order A Beer, So He Built a Restaurant Tech Company

Steve Simoni likes drinking beer. The problem is he just doesn’t like waiting for it.

But that’s exactly what he was doing every time he went to a busy restaurant. This meant getting up, heading over to the bar, and waving down the bartender.

“I really didn’t want to get up from my table,” Simoni told me this week in a Zoom interview.

So what does the engineering major turned software product manager do in this situation? Build a robot delivery system (obviously).

“I like to describe it as a sushi conveyor belt on the ceiling,” said Simoni.

Only instead of sushi, the conveyor belt delivered beer to the table. And while Simoni’s new company took on a robot-sounding name based on the first project in Bbot, it wasn’t long before he realized that the real opportunity to build a company was in software.

“The QR code (software) was part of the robot delivery system,” said Simoni. “After launching that bar in January of 2018, the next place was like ‘I’ll take all of it except the robots.’ That was March of 2018. Then we pivoted fully into that.”

While Simoni and Bbot initially focused on solutions for ordering at the table, Bbot eventually started dabbling with online ordering tools for restaurants. Then in early 2020, the company watched as the pandemic make off-premise mission-critical.

“When COVID happened, restaurants shut down for like two months straight, maybe more. During that time, we really started to double down on our delivery and pickup software.”

Today Bbot’s two sides of the business – in-venue and online ordering – are both growing fast. Any new conveyor robots, however, have been put on hold.

You can read my full conversation with Simoni below, where we talk about the future of online ordering, the importance of restaurant data, who has the potential to be a restaurant ‘decacorn’ and, of course, restaurant robots.

Michael Wolf: Steve, how are you doing?

Steve Simoni: Good.

Michael Wolf: Good. The last time we met face to face was in New York City. I think it was like February 28th, 2020. We just had a conference in Manhattan. And I think there was this cloud over all of us with the pandemic coming down. I think it was like the last official business trip I took.

Steve Simoni: Yeah. That was probably 15-16 months ago. And it’s good to see you on Zoom at least again.

Michael Wolf: Yeah. Your hair’s longer.

Steve Simoni: Yeah, I haven’t had it cut since we last saw each other.

Michael Wolf: Well, you have the pandemic cut, which is great, but we’re not here to talk about haircuts, but about restaurant tech. I’ve been following Bbot for a while and when I first got to know you guys, you were very focused on the in-venue at the table payment experience. That’s where you got your start. If you’re just going to give the elevator pitch, you’re telling someone at a party about BBot, how do you describe you guys?

Steve Simoni: The simple elevator pitch for Bbot is we make next-generation digital ordering tools for restaurants. And so that’s everything from their online ordering to their QR codes at the table. We handle that for our customers.

Michael Wolf: When you started the company, what was the original thinking? What was the problem you were trying to solve?

Steve Simoni: I had a little bit of a personal problem. I was in my late 20s. And I liked to drink beer and I needed a really convenient way to do that. I was like, ‘I wish I could just order another round and put it in’. And you know, servers are very busy hitting up all the tables, so they can’t be at every table at once. So I thought this would be a really good way to do it.

Michael Wolf: Right up until a couple of years ago, pay at the table wasn’t widely available yet. You had to go stand at the bar or catch the attention of the waiter. That probably frustrated you.

Steve Simoni: It did. And although the technology was able to be built for years before we did it, I realized why it wasn’t. It’s that restaurants are complicated. They’re hard to operate. There’s an expectation of service. There are just all these different reasons besides the tech that were stacked against us from the beginning.

Michael Wolf: So you start a restaurant tech company. Were you a programmer doing something else? How did you get into this?

Steve Simoni: The name Bbot is because I was side hustling as a robotics company. We were making an overhead ceiling robot.

Michael Wolf: I remember that. There was like some weird overhead robot thing?

Steve Simoni: Yeah, exactly. I like to describe it as a sushi conveyor belt on the ceiling.

Michael Wolf: You really wanted a robot to deliver your beer.

Steve Simoni: I really didn’t want to get up from my table. So that was the original idea. And we were kind of doing that as a side hustle at first. And then we launched it at a bar, and then kind of went full time on it basically launched it at a bar in Cincinnati.

Michael Wolf: And is that still in use today?

Steve Simoni: Yeah, still operational. It still powers their entire delivery in their bar.

Michael Wolf: At some point, you saw the light, you said maybe there’s more business to be had in writing software and digitizing the order at the table. When was that decision made?

Steve Simoni: So part of the robot delivery system was the QR code. After launching that bar in January of 2018, the next place was like ‘I’ll take all of it except the robots.’ That was March of 2018. Then we kind of pivoted fully into that.

Michael Wolf: You saw that there’s probably a lot more people who just want to use digital ordering than put big robotic conveyor belts in the restaurants?

Steve Simoni: Oh yeah, it’s very logical. (laughs)

Michael Wolf: So before you did this robotics thing, were you in restaurants? What were you doing before that?

Steve Simoni: My first career was in the US Navy. The career that I left to do Bbot was marketing software. I was a product manager in marketing tech. It’s helpful now because many restaurants are trying to help capture guest data and I’m very familiar with that world. And we build a lot of tools to help them.

Michael Wolf: So you made this pivot towards digital ordering. And when I think when we connected in February of 2020, you had started to expand beyond the table. When did you decide to move into a full suite of products, including online ordering?

Steve Simoni: So when COVID happened, right after we met in February of last year, restaurants shut down for like two months straight, maybe more. And during that time, we really started to double down on our delivery and pickup software. Just because what was the major request at the time. And, you know, we didn’t know it was going to happen in the future. With restaurants, they were very uncertain times. But that was around the time, like at the beginning of COVID, where we really started building a lot of that out more.

Michael Wolf: Okay, so you had some initial work in digital ordering, but you really started to flesh it out. For a lot of restaurants, you probably got a lot more inbound requests for online ordering. How would you explain the full suite of products?

Steve Simoni: We have online ordering, which comprises direct ordering on your website for delivery or pickup. That’s one piece. And the other piece is in-venue ordering, which is all of the tools you would need to run digital ordering inside of your restaurant. Those are the two product lines and we sell them separately.

Michael Wolf: It’s a competitive space, right? If you look at your peer group, you have everyone from Lunchboxes of the world, the GoTabs and Bentoboxes. All these guys are helping restaurants digitize. Are you going to head to head with a lot of these guys?

Steve Simoni: Yeah, so remember, I said there are two lines of business. There’s online ordering. And there’s in-venue ordering. And so, in-venue has different competitors than online. But yeah, it’s a very competitive space. So which keeps us on our toes to try to make it the best we can.

Michael Wolf: And we can’t talk about restaurants and what’s happened over the past year or two without going a little bit into ghost kitchens. I know that you guys do some business with ghost kitchens and some virtual brands. Talk a little bit about that side of your business.

Steve Simoni: Ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants a very fast-growing part of the business. The brands can scale really quickly. The concept is they’re taking kitchen space and launching delivery-only products out of there, essentially. They scale their unit count really quickly because they don’t have to build out new stores. So obviously, if they’re scaling, then the software is scaling. We work with companies like TiffinLabs, which are scaling it out of hotel kitchens for the Absolute Brands by Dog Haus. We work with stuff like that. Our eyes are on this market because what we’re looking to see is the order volume. To see how big the market is.

Michael Wolf: I wrote yesterday about NASCAR launching their own virtual restaurants. VDC is powering it. The tech is by Lunchbox. They’re the ones behind the MrBeast Burger. So there are all sorts of genres of virtual brands, or virtual restaurants. There’s a whole genre of celebrity-driven ones. Were you seeing success in the virtual restaurant space?

Steve Simoni: Yeah, what I see doing really well is people that are taking a strong brand, a simple concept like a burger brand that is strong regionally, and rolling out more areas to have it ordered via delivery. Dog Haus is a good example where they have a strong brand with Absolute Brands that they’ve made, and they’re just putting it in more of their kitchens regionally. With the celebrity stuff, I’m not too sure. I think that’s kind of gimmicky. But I have seen that taking a simple menu that has a strong brand and just getting it into more kitchens works.

Michael Wolf: Yeah. That’s the Wow Bao approach. They did really well, but they already had a decent brand that they built. And they’ve really doubled down on the virtual side. The question have I always asked about celebrity brands is what is the soul of the brand? Is it hollowed out? Is there brand equity there? Or is it just like a guy who’s a famous Youtuber doing a food brand? How committed is he?

Steve Simoni: I think they (celebrity brands) are good for things like a pop-up shop. MrBeast Burger, I don’t know if it’s a sustainable business. Celebrities aren’t restaurateurs. You have to care about the food.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, I think maybe celebrity chef-driven virtual brands might work. A Guy Fieri. People know him. They would order food based on his recipes.

Steve Simoni: That I definitely agree with. If it’s a real person who cares about the food backing the brand, that can work. Now if it’s Wiz Khalifa. I’m not exactly sure of that.

Michael Wolf: Talk about where you see digital restaurant tech going? I mean, it seems like most chains obviously now have kind of like a full digital ordering suite. They’re starting to digitize in-venue. Or am I wrong? Are there laggards, national chains or regional chains, that are still running behind in their digitization efforts, both in-venue and online?

Steve Simoni: I think most of them are getting online now. At least for their delivery and pickup, they’re coming up with solutions. They’re coming out with a program, they’re getting their packaging, their online menus, correct. I think it’s just that movement has really accelerated with COVID. The in-venue piece, I think in certain segments, they’re really starting to add QR codes at the table. Other segments, I don’t think they might ever do it. They’re not going to leverage order and pay at the table in the fine-dining segment. I do think that’s one of the crazy changes since COVID; In 2018, selling QR codes at the table is so much different than selling it right now.

Michael Wolf: You have these two sides of the business and so you have different competitive peer groups. But I think what we’re gonna see over time with restaurants is the consumer will have the ability to both order online and in-venue and the restaurant will have a full understanding of that. It will be a unified CRM, a unified profile. Is that something that you hear a conversation about? Are you working with restaurants that are trying to have a more holistic treatment of the consumer profile and customer data, both in and out of the venue?

Steve Simoni: Well, I don’t know if you remember, we used to partner with a company called SevenRooms. And we still integrate with them. The partnership is now changed to a product integration. So we have a lot of joint customers, and we work together to create that 360-degree view, I do think the reservation companies, like SevenRooms or OpenTable or Resy are really well equipped to handle the guest profile. As an ordering company, we feed them that data. And those are really good matches. I can’t announce it yet, but I got a new thing coming soon around that particular point, but I can’t talk about it right now. But I do think that those table management and CRM companies are really hot right now. Startups like Bikky, or bigger startups like Wisely, these things are going to be all the rage in the next 24 months to 36 months. Ordering companies like Bbot, we’re going to be the ones collecting the data but feeding it into those systems.

Michael Wolf: Let’s talk about some of the giants in the space. Toast has filed to go public. I’ve looked a little bit at their S1 and it’s kind of a weird S1, right? They make a lot of their money in ways that you wouldn’t expect if you’re trying to look at Toast.

Steve Simoni: Yeah, I wrote an article about this. Toast going public is the final of the three major restaurant tech players going public. We also have DoorDash with marketplaces, Olo for online ordering for enterprise, and then Toast as the best restaurant point of sale. They’ve all gone public now. And Toast is very interesting, much different than Olo. Olo makes their money from software fees, but Toast primarily makes most of their money from payments. And, you know, the S1 shows that payments are about about 75% of their revenue. And that’s just the difference in the buyer. Toast is selling to small businesses that don’t have a ton of money to spend upfront on software fees. So that’s like a pay-as-you-go model. Olo will lock you into a three to five-year contract with stable software revenue, and the big enterprises that they sell to are so big that they can beat them down and destroy all the payments margin. So they’re different companies.

Michael Wolf: And so, Olo is selling to the big national chain. And Toast is capturing the smaller restaurant players.

Steve Simoni: Yeah, Toast has a much bigger addressable market because there are a lot more small and medium-sized businesses than there are enterprises. And in that market, the way to monetize is through payment processing.

Michael Wolf: In Dan Primack’s newsletter today, he talked about how we need to move beyond unicorns to what he’s calling ‘dragons’. He’s essentially saying that It’s not that impressive to be a company with a billion-dollar valuation anymore. Let’s talk about the 10 billion-dollar companies. I was trying to think in food tech, in restaurant tech, will it be a dragon?

Steve Simoni: if I had to bet on a restaurant tech company that’s going to have a 10 billion dollar market cap or greater, I would definitely put all my money on Toast.

Michael Wolf: Do you think they got it? Do they have the model and the juice and can continue to grow in value?

Steve Simoni: Yeah. Olo can’t get there because they can’t monetize payments down market. Here I’m taking my CEO hat off and putting on my analyst hat. This is not investment advice, but Toast is poised to be the largest restaurant tech company in the history of the US.

Michael Wolf: Interesting. Well, because we like to nerd out on robots, where do you see automation going in the restaurant? We’ve seen some back-of-house stuff that is interesting. A lot of stuff on the pizza side. I feel like there could be more happening in the front of house. Where do you see things going in the restaurant robot space?

Steve Simoni: Okay, I love this space as you know. I think people are going to adopt kitchen preparation robots first. I think that you see that with the burger-flipping one (Flippy from Miso Robotics). And other robots like that are being made and prepping food. Delivery robots like BBot, or Savioke – they do delivery robots in hotels. Bear Robotics. We have joint customers that have a BBot ordering system plus a Bear Robotics’ robot. That’s cool to see. Those are going to come second. I think they still need some more work. But I think the preparation robots are ready now. Like the next two years, food prep robots should give more proliferation.

Michael Wolf: If you stand back though, and talk about AI and automation in restaurants. I think one of the big next waves is going to be voice interfaces and voice automation, whether that’s at the drive-thru, like some sort of bot taking your order, with maybe a human backup for that 5% edge case where things go wrong. Or, or even just in-venue, a fast-casual restaurant you walk in, I can see a lot more voice ordering there.

Steve Simoni: Alright, here’s my anti-voice pitch.

Michael Wolf: Okay, go for it.

Steve Simoni: When you talk with Alexa, it then technically goes and asks the cloud your question and then waits for an answer from the cloud, from the cloud servers, and then it comes back, and then it tells you the answer. That round trip time is actually pretty long in a real restaurant setting. As a New Yorker, look how fast I talk. I don’t want to wait for the server lag time, back and forth. It’s just not natural. So what I think they need to do is have a lot of the processing of the voice on the actual hardware device. Not make it cloud-based, make it on-premise, edge-cached, on-prem hardware so that voice processing doesn’t have to go talk to the cloud. Then it could be good. That’s my voice-is-nowhere- near-ready pitch.

Michael Wolf: I think you have a point there. That’s interesting. What do you think about something like this that isn’t just voice, but telepresence? Like Bite Ninja?

Steve Simoni: Yeah, I think Bite Ninja is quite disruptive because they’re using humans in the loop there to solve this lag time problem. I think I first read about them on The Spoon.

Wolf: Of course you read about it on The Spoon (laughs).

Steve Simoni: I’m on your Slack feed. And you guys always have the breaking news for us or the restaurant tech world. So I mean, thank you for what you do. But yeah, they’re awesome. That’s a cool model.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, yeah. Well, we got to hear your contrarian viewpoint on voice tech. I appreciate that. I always like a good contrarian view. Steve, always good to catch up with you. Thanks for talking to me about restaurant tech.

Steve Simoni: Thanks.

July 22, 2021

Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software

Restaurant ordering and payment processing platform Bbot announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by CRV and follows a $4 million extension to its Seed round the company raised in January of this year. Bbot’s total amount of funding is now $22.3 million.

Broadly speaking, Bbot helps restaurants, bars, hotels, ghost kitchens and other hospitality establishments add in-venue and online ordering. The company offers a range of hardware tools such as tablets, scanners and printer controls, as well as a suite of software to enable contactless and online ordering and manage catering.

Bbot’s system uses QR codes, which restaurants can place on tables and customers can scan with their own phones to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items. While the QR code-based ordering isn’t new, it has gained much more attention over the last year because of its inherently contactless nature. In her recent 2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem market map, Brita Rosenheim predicted that these type of tools will become more important to restaurants, writing:

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus.

Bbot is just the latest bit of restaurant tech funding we’ve seen over the past month. 86 Repairs raised $7.3 million for its restaurant machine maintenance and repair service. Choco raised a whopping $100 million to digitize the relationship between restaurants and food suppliers. And Zenput raised $27 million to help multi-unit restaurants widely release and enforce operating procedures and health and safety protocols.

In its press announcement, Bbot said it has added more than 700 customers and reached 85 employees across 14 states over the last year. With its new funding, Bbot said it will create new POS and loyalty program integrations, and will focus on features for food halls and virtual brands. The company also plans to launch a self-service Bbot app store, so developers can integrate their apps with Bbot’s existing platform.

January 26, 2021

Bbot Raises $4M for Its Contactless Dining Room Tech

Restaurant tech startup Bbot announced today it has closed a $4 million seed extension funding round, bringing its total funding to $7.3 million. The seed extension round was led by Rally Ventures with participation from existing investor Craft Ventures, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The round follows Bbot’s $3 million fundraise from July 2020. The new funding will go towards hiring new talent and accelerating product development. Currently, Bbot makes a mobile order and payments platform restaurants can use to promote more “contactless” experiences in the dining room.

Of course, “contactless” was arguably the buzzword in the restaurant biz in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed eating establishments all over the world to promote more social distancing for in-restaurant experiences. Bbot uses a common method, providing restaurant-goers with a QR code they can scan to browse a menu and order and pay for food. The Bbot system integrates directly into a restaurant’s existing tech setup. 

In today’s press release, the company said it plans to introduce a new feature in 2021 that “reinvents the traditional bar tab” by allowing customers and bartenders joint access to it. Bbot will also release its own API that will let hospitality businesses “build on the Bbot infrastructure,” though more specifics were not provided.

The release (and subsequent success) of the bar tab feature may hinge partly on the direction of the pandemic, since bars specifically remain shuttered in many places. For the restaurant/bar/hospitality sector in general, there is a lot of competition afoot at the moment, since pretty much every front-of-house focused restaurant tech company released some version of a contactless order/pay system over the last year. Activity in this space has plateued slightly after the initial rush to go contactless. However, as a COVID-19 vaccine becomes more widespread and dining room restrictions relaxed, we expect competition to fire up once more.

July 14, 2020

Bbot Raises $3M for Its Contactless Restaurant Tech Solution

NYC-based restaurant tech company Bbot today announced a $3 million seed funding round led by Craft Ventures. The company says it will use the new funds to hire up and expand its reach and product capabilities, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Bbot, which was founded in 2017, was ahead of the times when it originally launched its mobile order and pay platform that emphasizes contactless functionality and minimizes human-to-human contact in restaurants and bars. The system integrates directly with a restaurant or bar’s existing tech setup. Customers use their own phones to scan a QR code (usually placed on a decal on the table) and browse the menu, as well as order and pay for food. 

Bbot points to a number of different advantages with this setup. Most obviously, contactless features in the dining room makes it easier for restaurants to foster social distancing among customers and staff. It also more or less forces restaurants to have at least some digital presence, which is becoming increasingly mandatory these days. Bbot also says the system can increase revenue for the restaurant, and that some of its existing clients have seen a 15 percent lift thanks to the system.

While that’s an encouraging figure, the challenge right now for any restaurant tech is two-fold. First is the sheer amount of competition in the restaurant tech space — particularly when it comes to the consumer-facing side of things. As I said earlier, companies that formerly served the front of house are now racing to find new ways to stay relevant. So far, that’s been through contactless dining kits a la Paytronix, Zuppler, Presto, and many others. 

The other part of the challenge is that the state of restaurant dining rooms remains uncertain, to put it mildly. Some states and/or individual businesses are halting or reversing their reopening plans, thanks to a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases, and businesses are being encouraged to continue their focus off-premises orders.

On that latter note, Bbot has an advantage in that its system is designed to work for any type of restaurant setting, including the off-premises ones. That ability to translate across restaurant formats plus its early entry into the contactless space may give Bbot a greater advantage over the competition, even if dining rooms don’t reopen the way we thought they would.

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