Popmenu Raises $65M for its Restaurant Digital Advertising and Ordering Platform
Popmenu, a digital restaurant marketing and ordering platform, announced today that it has raised $ 65 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with the participation of the new investor Salesforce Ventures and the existing investors Bedrock Capital, Base10 and Felicis Ventures. This brings the total amount of funds raised by Popmenu to $ 87.1 million.
Popmenu’s online tool suite enables restaurants to build their own branded websites with dynamic, interactive menus. Restaurants can also coordinate delivery or collection, enable customer reviews and generate follow-up actions for digital marketing. Popmenu also offers a contactless ordering software package (made even more important by the pandemic) that allows diners to scan a QR code with their smartphone to view and order restaurant menus.
During the pandemic last year when the dining rooms closed, the restaurant industry turned to delivery and takeout to stay alive. The easiest way to do this was to partner up with a third-party delivery service like Uber Eats or DoorDash. But this easy route to delivery came at the expense of the handover of both the customer relationship (i.e. the order and sales data) and the ability to control branding. Some restaurant technology companies even went so far as to describe the pandemic as a “wake-up call” for restaurants where, how, and by whom their data is being accessed.
As an alternative to delivery marketplaces, Popmenu is billed as a tool with which restaurants can control the customer’s journey from landing on the person’s website to clicking the order button and charging their credit card.
This rebuilding of direct relationships between restaurants and consumers is touted by many software services today, with each of Toast, Square, Olo, and others offering some form of direct ordering. Squarespace’s recent acquisition of the hospitality management platform Tock is likely to create more competition in that space as well.
At the same time, the delivery services themselves are also bringing their own “commission-free” ordering platforms onto the market. Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats have all announced a version of this concept to firmly anchor restaurants (and their data) in their own ecosystem.
For its part, Popmenu says it will use the new funding to accelerate the development of its Popmenu Max, which adds some AI-based functionality to its all-in-one solution.
