Reservation and table management platform, Tock, today announced that it has raised $9.5 million, led by Valor Equity Partners and Origin Ventures. This is the third round of funding for Tock and brings the total amount raised by the company to $19 million.
Tock is a cloud-based reservations software system and, according to the company, it’s the only platform that allows restaurants to set up three types of reservations: free, deposit and fully pre-paid. The Tock system also integrates with a restaurant’s POS software to gather and surface relevant guest data, so a restaurant can learn how often someone dines there, when their birthdays are, food preferences, etc.
Tock is currently used by more than 1,000 restaurants across 23 countries. I spoke with Tock CEO Nick Kokonas, who said that the company is growing 15 percent month-over-month, and that the money will be used to scale up marketing, sales and support.
“We started with the high-end,” Kokonas said of his clientele and go-to market strategy, “and are working toward the middle.”
Given the boom in restaurant delivery, I asked Kokonas if Tock will broaden its scope to incorporate off-premise business. “We are not looking to get into delivery,” he said.
Which is probably a good idea since there is plenty of competition in the reservation space alone, and there has already been some consolidation. Kokonas was actually in the news earlier this month when he tipped off Eater about rival reservation platform Resy acquiring competitor Reserve. The New York Times later confirmed the acquisition and noted that Resy serves 10,000 restaurants worldwide. OpenTable, which was bought by Priceline in 2016, operates in more than 50,000 restaurants.
For its part, Kokonas said that Tock is adding 4 – 5 new restaurants a day and that the company is prepping a new feature that allows smaller restaurants and pop-up events to self-onboard onto the Tock platform.
