TableHero secures $1M seed funding, led by growX ventures
US and Bengaluru-based intelligent operating system for restaurants and small local businesses, Table-Hero has raised $ 1 million in a seed funding round led by growX ventures. Other investors like Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, Co-founders of FreeCharge, and Haresh Chawla, Partner at IVFA, also participated. With this funding, the platform plans to do the further product development of TableHero’s existing suite of tools and bolster its engineering and product design team.
“We are re-imagining the technology stack for small local businesses by building an intelligent small business Operating System (OS). The OS will include a suite of products that will vastly simplify website and digital presence management; reservations, bookings and appointments; and payments, loyalty and customer management,” says Deap Ubhi, Co-founder and CEO, TableHero.
He adds that his goal is to re-imagine the small local business technology stack in a way that makes technology invisible for small local business owners. The first product in this stack will be an intelligence-driven, one-click website maker for restaurants. It takes all the effort out of building and managing a digital presence for a small local business. The company will initially be launching its services in the US with a focus on West Coast cities such as Portland, Seattle, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. It will be targeting restaurants as its early adopters.
On funding, Sheetal Bahl, CEO, growX ventures, says, “We're betting on the team of TableHero, which has significant early-stage exposure through their past experiences in critical engineering and product design roles at Flipkart, Ola, Zomato, FreeCharge and Cleartrip. Deap himself is a star – who founded Burrp, ran Freecharge in a tough growth period. Now, he's put together an amazing set of people to create a technology stack which has the potential to disrupt the long-standing hegemony of the incumbents in the F&B tech space across geographies.”
According to a study by National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) and management consultancy firm Technopak, 2013, the market size of the country's restaurant sector is Rs 2,47,680 crore. And it is 24 times bigger than the film industry and places it $9 billion ahead of the telecom sector. And, it is projected to swell to Rs 4,08,040 crore ($78 billion) by 2018 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 per cent with the organised sector expanding at 16 per cent.
In the restaurant segment alone, many technology platforms are offering different services from table reservations to guest management.
During April last year, Zomato acquired US-based NexTable, a restaurant reservations and table-management platform. The new service is called Zomato Book. Vir Sanghvi-curated review and table reservation platform, EasyDiner, raised $3 million Series A recently, co-led by existing investor DSG Consumer Partners and new investor Saama Capital. Last year, Times Internet’s Dineout announced the acquisition of inResto, which offered services like table management, reservations, CRM & analytics, home delivery and takeaway management.