UrbanPiper, a software-based restaurant management platform on Monday raised $24 million in its Series B funding round led by existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global, and new investors Swiggy and Zomato.
A slew of reputed angel investors also participated in the funding round, including Pankaj Chaddah (Shyft), Ankit Nagori (Curefoods), Saahil Goel and Vishesh Khurana (Shiprocket), Khadim Bhatti and Vara Kumar (Whatfix), among others.
UrbanPiper is a B2B software platform that offers a single outlet to help restaurants run their entire operations by bringing a suite of digital offerings together to ensure all the commerce workflows of a restaurant can happen seamlessly in a single dashabord.
UrbanPiper counts several marquee restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway, Cure Foods, Taco Bell, Rebel Foods, etc. among its user base. It currently claims to process over 18% of all online food orders placed each month in India.
Founded in 2015 by Saurabh Gupta, Anirban Majumdar, and Manav Gupta in Bengaluru, UrbanPiper has raised around $15 million in equity financing, excluding the current round. The company plans to use the funds raised to scale its product and engineering teams, strengthen its platform capabilities, as well as broaden its offerings to enable more services to restaurants. The restaurant management platform is already live in 27,000 restaurant locations across eight countries, including India and the Middle East.
It currently processes 14 million orders per month, which equates to approximately $750 million of estimated order value annually. UrbanPiper plans to launch in more regions across India, MENA and EU with the aim of onboarding 200,000 restaurant locations on the platform in the next two years.
Currently, a restaurant signs up with an average of 6-10 different online channels and food delivery aggregators, making it challenging to manage multiple tablets and dashboards. Through UrbanPiper, restaurants can integrate all these aggregators onto a single dashboard and connect it with their points of sale resulting in a 70% decrease in order failure rates.
“The restaurant industry is growing at an exponential rate, offering us a huge opportunity to create value and shape the next generation of restaurant businesses. With this investment, we will continue to widen UrbanPiper’s offerings to meet many more digital opportunities in the restaurant ecosystem, along with bolstering our platform capabilities. We are grateful to see both Swiggy and Zomato come together and participate in this round; a huge validation that what we are building is adding a lot of value to the food ecosystem,” said Saurabh Gupta, CEO, UrbanPiper in a statement.
Swiggy and Zomato’s investment into the B2B platform come at a time when both firms have been doubling down on restaurant SaaS as a strategy to expand market share. Last month, FE reported that India’s restaurant industry has shown renewed interest in investing in software tools and tech products that help complement their revenue. Restaurants are tapping on SaaS-based CRM tools, inventory management software, reservation automation tools, and point of sale (PoS) solutions, in an effort to drive up demand that they lost during the pandemic.
In FY20, Zomato’s primary revenue source included ad sales, food delivery, ordering and Zomato Pro subscriptions. For its next leg of growth, Zomato is now doubling down as a direct service provider for restaurants by offering online discovery, table booking, cloud kitchen infrastructure and B2B raw material supply for restaurants. Zomato has also made multiple acquisitions in the SaaS segment and most recently it paid $5 million in cash to acquire restaurant management platform UrbanPiper for a 5% stake in the company, as a part of a larger $24 million round.
Swiggy is also reportedly in talks to acquire PoS software provider Dineout in a $25-50 million deal. Dineout is one of the current leaders in the online restaurant reservation space and also offers SaaS tools. The deal could likely provide Swiggy with enough manpower and the tech stack required to break into the restaurant SaaS space.
