EAT app, a Dubai-based online restaurant reservation platform used throughout the Middle East, has raised a $5 million Series B round of funding led by 500 Startups and Derayah VC. This brings EAT’s total amount of money raised to $9.2 million.
Magnitt, which bills itself as a “guide to the startup community, investors and VCs in the Middle East,” ran what looks to be the press announcement from EAT yesterday. In it, EAT says that it is the top restaurant reservation platform in the Arab World and works with more than 1,000 different restaurant and hospitality customers. EAT also says that it has more than 46 million monthly active users and has generated $32 million for the restaurants on its network.
More than just an app, EAT’s online platform acts as an entire guest-management system for restaurants, letting businesses view and manage bookings from various channels (online, phone, etc.) in a single view, confirm those bookings digitally, manage servers, view the restaurant floorplan, and access analytics, among other things. Restaurants pay a flat monthly fee to use EAT’s platform, and can add integrations, like POS systems, for an additional charge.
We don’t know a whole lot about the restaurant biz in the Middle East, but we do know that the online reservation space is a crowded one. OpenTable, TouchBistro, SevenRooms and American Express (which acquired Resy) are all players trying to book your next restaurant table.
We also know that the future of actually eating at a restaurant is set to undergo drastic changes as off-premises eating continues to grow and, well, eat up a bigger percentage of the restaurant business.
None of that is stopping EAT, however, which says it will use its new funding to invest in R&D and “expand and solidify” its presence across the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia.
