Restaurant-management software company xtraCHEF announced yesterday it has raised a $7.5 million Series A round for its back-of-house focused business intelligence platform. The round was led by MVP Capital Partners with participation from existing investors ValueStream Ventures and Laconia Capital Group. This round brings the company’s total funding to $10.5 million.
Founded in 2015, company automates business-related restaurant tasks like bookkeeping, order tracking, and building budgets via its cloud-based software platform. Such tasks, usually left to owners, chefs, and managers to perform, are a great example of the kind of “busy work” that’s at high risk for human error but could easily be streamlined with technology for greater accuracy. Plus, data entry is boring and not why anyone gets into the restaurant business in the first place. Automating much of it can, in theory at least, free up restaurant staff’s time and help them make the hospitality business more, er, hospitable.
The xtraCHEF platform works across devices and brings inventory management, invoicing, and accounting into a single interface that also syncs with QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, Toast POS, and other third-party tools. If much of your bookkeeping is done on actual paper, xtraCHEF can digitize it with a simple photo or email and organize the information within its interface. And of course, all that data becomes potentially useful information for restaurants to act on, whether it’s around a declining budget or repeatedly late orders from a vendor.
Bringing order to the oftentimes chaotic back of house at a restaurant is something many companies these days are trying to do through software. Which is to say, xtraCHEF faces some serious competition. Of late, Resy, who started out as a humble restaurant reservations platform, has morphed into an end-to-end system that will handle back of house management; the company also just announced it was being acquired by American Express. Toast, who seems to add a new feature or partner every other week, recently added payroll management to its restaurant-tech arsenal.
According to the press release, xtraCHEF will use the new funds to continue growing both the product itself and the team of people working behind it.
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