As restaurants adopt more technology, the need for a platform that brings all that siloed software under one digital roof grows. Foodetective, is one such company trying to do that with its solution, and today, the company announced that it has raised $2 million in seed funding for its Foodetective for Business platform. The round saw participation from angel investors Serge Schoen, Filippo Catalano, Imai Jen La Plante, and Charles Lorenceau.
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the Foodetective platform has two parts: a consumer-facing restaurant discovery platform and Foodetective for Business, an operations platform restaurants can use to organize and run their many disparate pieces of software and view them from a single dashboard. The platform currently integrates services from more than 300 vendor partners and POS subscribers to create a single platform that manages reservations, delivery, HR, social media, logistics, waste management, inventory management, finances, wholesalers and more. Foodetective works with POS providers such as Square, Uber Eats, Stripe and Orkestro, along with hundreds of wholesalers including Nestlé and other FMCG companies.
Restaurants can also search for new pieces of technology to meet a specific need (e.g., “delivery”) and the platform will make relevant suggestions. Additionally and importantly, businesses can access data for all their different services from the Foodetective dashboard for a more comprehensive view of the entire business.
The funding raise comes at a time when restaurants need a simple, single interface with which to manage their growing tech stacks. Ease of use is also important, since GMs and servers are in the restaurant to serve food and interface with customers, not act as IT support. Along those lines, Foodetective says its solution is “plug and play,” and appropriate for large chains as well as small restaurants.
Right now, few others are able to manage the entire restaurant tech stack with their platforms. In the U.S., Toast and Square offer similar capabilities on their platforms, though both are also still best known for their payments systems. Foodtective will compete with those companies once it lands Stateside. Currently, the company hosts 17,500 restaurants, bars and F&B companies across Europe. The company says its services will “soon” be available in the U.S. through Foodetective’s global partners and wholesalers.
