TouchBistro, an iPad-based POS solution provider for restaurants, today announced that it has raised CDN $16.3 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Napier Park Financial Partners and Recruit Holdings Co, Ltd, with participation from existing investors, including BDC IT Venture Fund, Relay Ventures, and Kensington Capital Partners.
Founded in 2011 by Alex Barrotti and Geordie Konrad, TouchBistro offers a complete mobile POS system for the restaurant industry. Servers can manage reservations, view menus, take orders and review sales reports with a few simple touches on an iPad. According to the company’s funding statement, TouchBistro has been adopted in 37 countries, where more than 15,000 iPads have been deployed in more than 9,000 restaurants. TouchBistro POS solutions process gross merchandise volumes (GMV) of almost US $5 billion annually.
CEO and co-founder of TouchBistro | Credit: Crunchbase.com
“We have experienced significant growth over the past year and plan to continue on this exciting trajectory,” said Alex Barrotti, founder and CEO of TouchBistro, in the announcement. “Bringing together Napier Park, a fintech payments expert, and Recruit, a restaurant behemoth, in this transaction, together with our existing investors, positions us well to capture an even larger share of the emerging restaurant POS market.”
Napier Park is a leading fintech-focused growth equity firm with a long history of investing in payments companies. Recruit is a global company with more than 45,000 employees, 1,839 billion JPY (USD $16.5 billion) in annual revenue and more than 200 brands, including Hot Pepper Gourmet, the largest restaurant coupon and reservation service in Japan.
“With its world-class technology and visionary leadership team, TouchBistro fits perfectly within our investment portfolio of innovative companies embarking on game-changing opportunities,” said Mikihito Kawanami, division director at Recruit Holdings. As part of the transaction, Mizuho Hiraguri from Recruit Holdings will join the TouchBistro board of directors as an observer, and Daniel Kittredge, Napier Park managing director, will join its board of directors.
With an increasing number of restaurants ditching the traditional pen-and-paper way of managing orders, a dozen startups have popped up in recent years to provide the hospitality industry with the latest technology tools. New York City-based ShopKeep, for instance, one of TouchBistro’s closest competitors, has raised more than $70 million in funding and just acquired another ordering software called ChowBOT in March, 2017.
TouchBistro’s official announcement stated that the new funding will be used to enhance and expand the feature set in the TouchBistro iPad mobile restaurant point-of-sale (mPOS) solution and to facilitate the company’s expansion into global markets. This latest round brings TouchBistro’s total funding to date to CDN $45.3 million.