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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Popmenu

Popmenu Raises $65M for its Restaurant Digital Marketing and Ordering Platform

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.

Popmenu Raises $17M to Expand Its Restaurant Software Capabilities

Popmenu, a platform for digital ordering and reservations for restaurants, announced this week it has raised a $17 million Series B round. The round was led by Bedrock Capital, with participation from existing investors Base10 Partners and Felicis Ventures, as well as new investors Mantis Ventures and Chapter One Ventures. This brings Popmenu’s total funding to $22.1 million. 

In a press release sent to The Spoon, Popmenu said It will use the new funds to develop new features for its platform, which currently allows restaurants to manage online ordering and menus, collect direct feedback from customers (as opposed to getting it via third-party platforms), manage reservations, and integrate with delivery and reservations services. 

Right now, one of the company’s main selling points is that it gives restaurants more control over their own branding, which is tough to do in the age of online delivery platforms and user-driven review sites like Yelp and Google. To give restaurants more of that brand control, Popmenu creates customized websites that include the aforementioned features and that allow the restaurants’ customers to upload their own photos, feedback, and reviews.

In response to the pandemic, Popmenu, like other restaurant tech companies, also launched its own version of contactless software that lets guests scan a QR code with their own smartphones to view and order from restaurant menus. 

In addition to contactless features, having more control over their own branding (and customer data) has surfaced as a priority for restaurants since the start of the pandemic. SKS panelists noted yesterday that more restaurants, from large chains to mom-and-pop shops, are starting to bring more elements of the off-premises experience back into their own control. ShiftPixy, a company that provides not just custom-branded websites but also delivery drivers, is a huge supporter of restaurant-controlled customer data. Square just launched a similar function.

Even delivery services, like Uber Eats, now offer restaurants the ability to process orders via their own websites. The catch with that last one, of course, is that Uber Eats still owns the customer data, which kind of renders the whole point of maintaining one’s own website null and void.

As more companies like Popmenu bring features to the table that put branding and data back in the hands of restaurants, there will inevitably be more pushback from third-party delivery.

Restaurant Software Company Popmenu Raises $4.5M in Series A Funding

Atlanta, GA-based Popmenu, which makes guest engagement software for restaurants, just announced a $4.5 million Series A round led by Base10 Partners’ Rexhi Dollaku and with participation from Felicis Ventures’ Niki Pezeshki. To date, Popmenu has raised a total of $6 million.

Popmenu positions its SaaS platform specifically as a way for restaurants to regain more control over their branding online. That’s something food businesses in particular struggle with in an age when Yelp, Google, and third-party delivery sites double as discovery engines but are also known for posting mediocre photos, biased reviews, and other material that doesn’t always accurately represent a restaurant.

Popmenu is trying to change that by moving the digital conversation about any given restaurant back to the restaurant’s own website. Its cloud-based software provides a dynamic menu experience for customers, who can also upload photos, leave reviews, and interact with one another without leaving the restaurant’s own branded area online. They can also receive special offers and promotions. On the back end, restaurants get the advantage of real-time menu management and data analytics tools that can tell them more about customers and their preferences.

It remains to be seen if those features will be enough to entice restaurants to sign up with the service, and for customers to actually leave Yelp, Google, Grubhub, and other third-party sites, whose streamlined user experiences make them easy to use and therefore convenient.

“Restaurateurs are passionate and personally invested in their business, and to be able to help them feel a greater sense of control over their digital presence means everything to us,” Tony Roy, President and Co-Founder of Popmenu, said in a statement.

Restaurant review tools aside, he has a point. As off-premises restaurant orders proliferate and more businesses try their hand at the virtual restaurant concept, online branding is becoming as important as the food itself. Already, some chains are taking back control on parts of the delivery process, and discovery and recommendations are definitely a part of that.

According to the press release, the new funding will go towards further R&D for Popmenu’s platform.