Enterprise digital order logistics firm Olo (NYSE: OLO) announced it would acquire Omnivore, a platform that allows restaurants to plug in a huge variety of technologies into their point of sale.
The announcement came midway through Olo’s fourth-quarter earnings call. Olo founder and CEO Noah Glass said Omnivore would help restaurants become the digital enterprises they want to become.
“Restaurant brands are telling us they want to operate as one digital business. They are pulling us into payments and on-premise opportunities. And in order to accelerate the restaurant’s ability to operate as one business, we must unlock on-premise solutions,” said Glass during the earnings call. “That is why I’m excited to announce that Olo has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Omnivore.”
At the core, Omnivore is a smart connectivity platform with the Omnivore Connect API at the center of its offering. This API allows technology makers to connect to a single framework instead of writing connections for every single point of sale.
That makes the potential for this acquisition murky, as there are dozens of tools that connect to Omnivore. When integrated, it will increase Olo’s technology partnerships by 50 percent to more than 300 partners.
Glass called out the two-way communication that Omnivore’s API enables.
“Olo plus Omnivore will allow our restaurant brands to: One, insert and extract back-of-house data through faster, easier two-way connections with technology partners via their developer-friendly POS API, further unifying disparate data and simplifying data review,” said Glass.
This also helps Olo expand digital orders in general. Glass said the company wants to help the industry go from about 15 percent of digital orders (according to the National Restaurant Association) to 100 percent. That means going deeper into the restaurant and helping clients with in-person dining, namely allowing for open tabs to stay open, not close at every order.
“That’s not something Olo was built do to, but it was something Omnivore was built to enable,” Glass told Food On Demand.
He added that he’s excited to bring two connectivity driven and open-operation-minded teams together.
“We’ve always been an open ecosystem, as well,” said Glass. “Since I learned about Omnivore, I thought very highly of their team and platform. It brings me great joy to combine these two teams. Even in early conversations, the way they can compare notes about different point-of-sale systems and challenges, they’re like brothers-in-arms sharing war stories.”
He didn’t give a definitive timeline on when these offerings would show up on partners portals, but said the benefits will come before the integration is done.
“The nice thing is that Omnivore can run standalone, we don’t literally have to integrate the tech stacks, so that’s’ ready to go out of the box,” said Glass.
Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed, but numbers will come to light when Olo reports on the first quarter of 2022, likely in May.
