Your Fare continues a busy year with two transformational acquisitions. The Austin-based order integration and logistics company acquired Pronto, an online ordering solution for restaurants. The acquisition comes on the tails of Your Fare purchasing Beyond4, a SMS and loyalty app. Both deals were announced last week.
Your Fare founder and CEO Chris Monk said both help build out its one-stop suite of offerings under the Your Fare umbrella, one that is especially suited for smaller chains and independent operators struggling to develop their technology to manage through COVID-19.
“Both platforms make it easier for restaurants to take advantage of increased demand for online orders, especially as many restaurants are utilizing takeout and delivery for the first time,” said Monk. He said that specific cohort of restaurant owners is really struggling, and because many don’t have point of sale terminals (POS) that the larger chains have, they need a stopgap measure between full integration and the sea of tablets on the counter.
“We’ve seen a lot of restaurants without a POS system that can integrate third-party delivery,” said Monk. “They really need one tablet that can be a solution and print to the kitchen.”
He said sending everything to a single tablet instead of the point of sale also eases the workload for his development team, which was struggling to integrate orders into archaic platforms without modern integrations or APIs. Now, all those orders from both Pronto ordering, Your Fare’s integrations with third-party and into a single tablet.
Similarly, Beyond4 enables smaller restaurant operations to do the one-to-one marketing and communication the bigger chains do. That helps keep customers in the loop after an order goes out with a third-party driver.
“Now with Beyond4, you can actually market to those customers transactionally. When they place an order and provide their number, you can text them asking if the food arrived on time and did they enjoy the food,” said Monk.
As the suite of products under a single software-as-a-service payment expands, he said larger operators are also partnering with Your Fare, and both of the new acquisitions come with a substantial group of clients that have all come along in the transaction. He said the offering is becoming more of a one-stop platform for restaurant software instead of the typical separate vendors for loyalty, third-party integration, online ordering and customer communication.
Along with the technology and the book of business, the talent in both Beyond4 and Pronto have also joined Your Fare.
“Both companies were more in a development phase and had product-market fit and they had handfuls of customers on the Pronto side and Beyond4 had some larger enterprise clients. But for us it wasn’t really to acquire in a landgrab, it was more for the talent and the technology,” said Monk. “Don’t get me wrong, being able to increase our [monthly recurring revenue] is helpful, but really both founding teams were in a position where they were thinking, ‘Do we go out and raise a round and build out infrastructure like PR and HR and an accountant, with them being able to join our company we’re able to disperse those.”
He called out Creed Ford, the founder of Beyond4 as a notable new Your Fare board member. The CPA with a deep development background and a family restaurant empire of more than 35 locations will be a “huge value add for us,” Monk added.
Both deals were funded in part by a successful investment round of $2.4 million back in February, which consisted of equity and cash. He said the details are not being shared publicly.
Hear more about the deal, the investment landscape and the ordering logistics segment of the Food On Demand world when we talk to Chris Monk on the Food On Demand podcast—don’t miss it by subscribing today.
