Hospitality tech upstart Bbot grabbed another $15 million from investors, reaching more than $22 million raised so far. With this latest tranche, the company said it will “focus on features for food halls and virtual brands,” according to the release announcing the Series A round.
The New York-based company is mostly focused on in-house digital ordering via QR codes, but also helps restaurants create ordering websites and integrate with third-party delivery providers, and also helps hotel partners build digital room service programs.
Altogether, that’s a lot of different directions for one company, even if it’s generally the same product and process. But that’s the point for co-founder and CEO Steve Simoni, one of the three naval engineers who started the company. He said he wants to be the “Stripe of restaurants” in an interview about their last raise back in January, referencing a technology company that builds online payment processing software.
“There are two major products, the core software for merchants and the other piece is the API that we just released—that allows any future tech entrepreneur to leverage our stack. So, we have a bunch of startups with a dream to bring new service to the market that you can build on the Bbot rails,” Simoni added.
He said the latest round will help fuel both sides of the business.
“With this funding, we will continue to invest in creating the most advanced technology platform so our customers can focus on providing high-quality hospitality experiences, instead of worrying about the tools and integrations,” said Simoni.
The investment will help the company “finalize and ultimately launch a self-service Bbot app store, which will allow developers to immediately get started using Bbot’s existing platform to code their own extensions and apps,” according to the release.
That’s old news in the world of ecommerce, but it’s a new view on the technology landscape for the hospitality space. Whether it reaches anywhere near the level of penetration of Stripe, however, is quite a goal. Stripe reached a valuation of $95 billion this year and its various payments and authentication tools are plugged into scores of other products.
Reid Christian, general partner at venture capital firm CRV, said his firm lead the round because of that potential.
“Bbot has unique insight into the rapidly changing hospitality industry,” he said. “Their vision expands beyond the traditional POS industry, into a fully integrated software and payments platform enabling order and pay for the first time. This functionality enables hospitality operators and software developers to easily introduce features that are being demanded by their patrons and customers.”
According to the company, it added more than 700 customers and grew the team to 85 people in the last year.
