Food delivery rivals Swiggy and Zomato back restaurant tech firm UrbanPiper

Restaurant management platform raises $24mn in series B funding

UrbanPiper, a one-stop restaurant management platform, said that it has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global, and new investors Swiggy and Zomato. A slew of reputed angel investors also participated in the funding round including Pankaj Chaddah (Shyft), Ankit Nagori (Curefoods), Saahil Goel and Vishesh Khurana (Shiprocket), Khadim Bhatti and Vara Kumar (Whatfix).

The company plans to use the funds raised to scale its product and engineering teams, strengthen its platform capabilities, as well as broaden its offerings to enable more services to restaurants. The new-age restaurant management platform is already live in over 27,000 restaurant locations across eight countries, including India and West Asia. It currently processes 14 million orders per month, which equates to approximately $750 million of estimated order value annually. UrbanPiper plans to launch in more regions across India, MENA and EU with the aim of onboarding over 200,000 restaurant locations on the platform in the next two years.

“The restaurant industry is growing at an exponential rate, offering us a huge opportunity to create value and shape the next generation of restaurant businesses. With this investment, we will continue to widen UrbanPiper’s offerings to meet many more digital opportunities in the restaurant ecosystem, along with bolstering our platform capabilities,” said Saurabh Gupta, CEO, UrbanPiper. “We are grateful to see both Swiggy and Zomato come together and participate in this round; a huge validation that what we are building is adding a lot of value to the food ecosystem.”

The company, which has ove 150 employees in India, plans to increase its headcount in the country to 250 in the next year.

A B2B software platform, UrbanPiper aims to become a single window to help restaurants run their entire operations. It aims to bring a suite of digital offerings together to ensure all the commerce workflows for a restaurant can happen seamlessly in a simple and intuitive way. Owing to its scalability and reliability, UrbanPiper counts several marquee restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway, Cure Foods, Taco Bell and Rebel Foods among its user base. It currently processes over 18 per cent of all online food orders placed each month in India, and has achieved 10X growth over the past two years.

Founded by Saurabh Gupta, Anirban Majumdar, and Manav Gupta in Bengaluru, UrbanPiper is building a full-stack restaurant management platform that helps restaurants operate and scale their businesses with minimal hassle. Currently, a restaurant signs up with an average of 6-10 different online channels/aggregators – making it challenging to manage multiple tablets/dashboards. Through UrbanPiper, restaurants can integrate all these aggregators onto a single dashboard and connect it with their points of sale resulting in a 70 percent decrease in order failure.

"UrbanPiper is one of our key partners enabling us to seamlessly engage with restaurants and scale faster through their point-of-sale solutions,” said Sriharsha Majety, CEO, Swiggy. “Addressing specific needs, the team has always found ways to bridge gaps by creating a win-win for both restaurants and Swiggy. We are excited about the market potential and look forward to scaling our partner network with their continued support.”

Another investor, Shraeyansh Thakur, Principal, Sequoia India, said the restaurant ecosystem is evolving rapidly with changing consumer needs. Due to pandemic-led disruptions, merchants now increasingly want to adopt digital channels and upgrade their operations. “UrbanPiper is at the forefront of this digital transformation and is strategically positioned to build infrastructure connecting digital players to merchants in the F&B ecosystem,” said Thakur. “Sequoia Capital India is excited to deepen the partnership with the UrbanPiper team as they build further on their mission to empower restaurants globally, and welcome Zomato and Swiggy to this partnership.” 

Foodtech giants such as Swiggy and Zomato which have raised huge funding rounds recently are making acquisitions and forming strategic partnerships to tap the opportunities thrown by Indian food market which is expected to double to around $344 billion by the year 2025.

This month Bike taxi platform Rapido, raised $180 million in its latest Series D round. Led by new investor Swiggy, the round also saw investment from TVS Motor Company, along with existing investors, Westbridge, Shell Ventures, and Nexus Ventures, partaking in the fundraise. The company's valuation after the fundraise was $830 million.

Last month, Zomato Ltd was set to take control of Blinkit after the food aggregator extended a $150 million emergency loan facility to the quick commerce startup, in a transaction that valued Blinkit between $700 million and $800 million.

In an interview, Saurabh Gupta, CEO, UrbanPiper, said that he was already in touch with Swiggy co-founder Sriharsha Majety and Zomato founder  Deepinder Goyal. “We were closing the Series B funding round with our current investors. We felt if there is an opportunity to work closely with the partners (like Swiggy and Zomato), who also feel that there is a value that we are adding to the ecosystem, it might be interesting to (bring them on board).” 

However, both Swiggy and Zomato which compete with each other wanted to know if the other company is going to invest in UrbanPiper or not.

“From day one, we were very clear, if one of the companies (Swiggy or Zomato) is not interested to invest in UrbanPiper and then we will not do the deal with any one of them,” said Gupta. “The idea is to create a better ecosystem for each other to grow.”