Less than three months after Uber finalized its deal to acquire Postmates, the combined entity is spinning off Postmates’ robotics division as an independent company, now called Serve Robotics. Along with that announcement came word that Serve Robotics closed its first round of funding, led by venture capital firm Neo with participation by Uber and other investors.
Hungr, a San Diego-based order management and restaurant-delivery service, is the latest company striding into the virtual restaurant space with its new offering, Hungr Kitchen, which is launching with a stable of eight delivery-only brands aimed at existing restaurant spaces.
Instacart raised another $265 million from investors, sending the grocery delivery company’s valuation to just shy of $39 billion. This represents the fourth raise during the pandemic and doubles the valuation for the second time in the last year. The company raised $225 million in June of 2020, $100 million in July and $200 million in October. The latest raise brings the grand total to $790 million raised over the last year and pushed company valuation from about $8 billion to $38.7 billion in that same timeframe. It’s an exceptional […]
Point of sale and payment gateway Square released a pair of surveys exploring the future of the restaurant industry in the minds of restaurant operators and consumers. The company partnered with Wakefield Research to question 500 restaurant owners and 1,000 consumers about the future of restaurants in the U.S. No surprise, there were a lot of COVID-era questions and responses in the survey, but there were also plenty of notable trends to watch for as things get back to normal through 2021. Among the most interesting results from restaurant operators […]
Black and Mobile is a fast-growing restaurant delivery provider punching above its weight class following a year where both the pandemic and social unrest put a national focus on elevating Black-owned businesses. Founded by twin brothers in their early 20s, the company is moving beyond its East Coast roots into other major U.S. cities.
Just Salad, a fast-casual franchised restaurant brand, has launched its Housemade meal kit brand that it’s billing as a “no-commitment” meal kit and grocery brand with a focus on less waste and unnecessary packaging compared with other meal kit providers.
Waitr Holdings, a mid-size, third-party delivery provider and parent company of Bite Squad, announced its platforms are now fully integrated with Ordermark, a California-based restaurant online ordering management company.
There’s another hyper-local delivery platform coming in Nashville. Yes, another one! TripDelivers launched in January as an alternative to the big-name, third-party platforms. In fact, the landing page for the company and app calls out a number of the practices well known in the industry like percentage fees for restaurants, menu markups (which are generally at behest of restaurants) and lack of transparency in the process. Founder Robert McNulty said they wanted to do a few things differently. First, there is only a flat fee for restaurants after a $150 […]
Olo, one of the first big-name digital delivery order aggregators, is set to go public soon. The company filed its S-1 prospectus with lots of new details in its first public pitch to Wall Street. The New York-based company looks to raise $100 million in a public offering. For the unfamiliar, Olo describes itself as the “Leading SaaS Platform for On-Demand Restaurant Commerce.” The company has a laser focus on enterprise restaurant brands, as Chief Customer Officer Marty Hahnfeld told Food On Demand last month. It integrates digital orders and […]
DoorDash acquired robotic salad maker Chowbotics in a new push to give merchant partners additional options to deliver. The top delivery platform that went public in December announced the Chowbotics acquisition in a blog post. It noted that the “proven” model with more than 100 “Sally” machines on campuses, hospitals and grocery stores is truly incremental for merchants that want to put one of the machines in their facility. “What excites us most about Chowbotics is the team has developed a remarkable tool that will allow DoorDash merchants to grow. […]
