In an online world where consistent responses to customer feedback have a vital impact on a brand’s narrative, Marqii, a digital operations platform for the hospitality industry, continues to grow its guest engagement footprint among competitors, landing $4.5 million in Series A investment, bringing its total amount raised to $10 million.
The capital financing round was led by CEAS Investments, with strategic investment from GTM Fund and participation from Hatcher VC and Maccabee Ventures, and will accelerate Marqii’s product development with expanded capabilities for review management.
Founded in 2017, by Avi Goren, Evan Perlmutter and Bryan Rutcofsky, the company strives to help restaurants, bars, hotels, ghost kitchens and virtual brands deepen their customer relationships by providing one central place to manage online menus and listings, as well as respond to reviews.
Its latest product, the Managed Review Response service, creates personalized review responses in each brand’s own voice using a combination of AI and human intelligence.
“We are beyond excited to continue supporting the Marqii team who are building a must-have layer in the hospitality tech stack,” said Ronnie Martinez, VC associate at CEAS Investments and the newest Marqii board member. “The team has been busy building new products and integrations to deliver a seamless experience for restaurants and hospitality groups who have historically had to deal with fragmented operating systems. With one dashboard, operators have granular visibility to manage menus and hours for all their locations and can now automate review responses across the Internet.”
Avi Goren, Marqii cofounder
Marqii currently powers online operations for Sage Hospitality Group, Margaritaville, Levain Bakery, Marcus Samuelsson Group, Virtual Dining Concepts and Gregory’s Coffee, among others. The platform connects to more than 80 listing sites including Google, Yelp, Facebook, Bing and Apple Maps.
“We get to go an inch wide and a mile deep in hospitality,” said Goren in a video responding to the new funding. “That means when we look at reviews it’s not just your Google and your Yelp, we get to start talking about third parties, review sites, reservation sites, all this data that lives outside of your traditional brick-and-mortar ecosystem that is hospitality only. We get to start going deeper into potential integrations, expand our POS network and keep building features that relate to our multi-unit operators that are still applicable to our SMBs and single locations.”
According to Marqii, since its initial seed funding announcement in March 2022, the company has seen over 200 percent revenue growth and helped more than 8,000 hospitality businesses streamline their operations.
