Digitalisation of restaurants to propel growth of foodtech firms

Restaurant management platform UrbanPiper provides technology solutions to large food chains and restaurants. Post pandemic, hospitality industry has bounced back strongly. This has benefitted the foodtech company as more restaurants adopt digital means to streamline operations, and reach out to customers. The company with its offerings has seen strong growth in 2022 as compared to 2021. UrbanPiper has also expanded its footprints in foreign shores with operations in West Asian countries and the UK.

In a conversation with the Bizz Buzz, General Manager & Head of Business Unit of India, Ashish Saxena said that the company is focused on both profitability and growth. In April this year, the company raised $24 million in Series B funding led by existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global, and new investors Swiggy and Zomato. He said that the company is adequately funded now and will execute on its expansion plans with the raised amount. The startup is also adding new products to its bouquet of offerings for providing complete solution to restaurants. Despite intense competition, Saxena said that there is space for everyone to grow given that digitalisation among Indian restaurants remains at a low level.

In the post-pandemic period, hospitality industry has bounced back very strongly. Can you throw some light whether this is benefitting the food-tech space?

During the Covid period, restaurant industry went through a lot of stress in terms of lockdowns. Dining was shut for a long period of time and delivery was the only saviour. So, a lot of restaurants had to pivot from just being dining providers to embrace delivery. And I think a lot of business adapted to that well. But if you look at post Covid period, the industry has come back very strongly. Food aggregators have posted positive results, showing revenue growth as well as profitability growth. We are likely to see a lot of action in restaurant space with regard to private equity.

As a foodtech company, UrbanPiper serves both food chains and standalone restaurants. How are both segments performing in 2022 as compared to last year?

We have two types of customers or cohorts of customers. One is enterprise which comprises large brands like Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Curefoods, and many others. All these very resilient, large brands and grew very rapidly after the Covid period. So, our business is kind of benefiting from that growth.

The second cohort is the restaurant chains. They were really the ones which were most impacted during the Covid period because they had not embraced delivery that much. The reason being they didn't have the right systems in place so also the right technology. In fact, they didn't even have the right menu items in place which are delivery friendly. And this is where our tech-led solutions play a very significant role. Our technology applications enable restaurants to accept the order within the 60 seconds or even automatically once the order lands, marking it as per timelines. Against this backdrop, we've seen a very robust growth in 2022 as more and more restaurant players adopting technology and strengthening their businesses with technology-led solutions.

Our mission at UrbanPiper is to build technology which can take away every manual activity that the restaurant has to do right from the time that they set up the business to running it efficiently each day. So, it starts with obviously a billing solution which eases the pain of managing customer bills, taking them, collecting the money, ordering and managing the ingredient supply. We also provide solutions managing employees' payroll, compliances and all of that. And then, there comes the whole aspect of online delivery. We help in getting the restaurant listed on channels, getting the integrations up and running, making sure the menus are clean, which attract more orders. So, our product roadmap would be to build products for all of these small pieces that I told you about. We already have billing, inventory management, order taking and app loyalty. But we want to go deeper into each of these sections and build new solutions which help the restaurant cut away from all the manual headaches that they go through while setting up a restaurant.

And I think the good news is that while there is competition in this sector, there is also a huge base in India which is not yet fully digitized or still working with solutions which are suboptimal or not integrated. Also, we see this as a market which is not a winner-takes-all market where one player would dominate. There will be at least a healthy competition of four or five players who build good tech solutions and keep growing based on the features that they have. Ours is a SaaS (software as a service) platform. Our base model is very affordable, which comprises billing and inventory. And then there are some features which everybody doesn't want and therefore, those are priced incrementally at a marginal fee over the base subscription. So, it's easier for people to opt for it. We also offer trial period for those features so that restaurants can use it and see if they're benefiting from it and then only continue to pay for it.

UrbanPiper counts many restaurants chain as its customers which are competing in the market place. Do you follow high standards of data security?

We are ISO 27001 compliant company, which is the highest level of data security prevalence in the country. We are also in the process of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). All our data is with a very prominent cloud provider.

What are your expansion plans? Will you add headcount in coming quarters?

We have crossed about 200 odd employees in the last quarter. I believe that we would be around 300 people team next year or so.

As far as our operations in abroad are concerned, we are seeing very good traction in our international markets site. We launched operations in Dubai and Middle East, North African markets, & UK as early as start of this year. And we've seen a very positive momentum for our solutions. We are building teams in both these markets. On the ground, we have got a few enterprise customers. Our plan is to keep opening in new geographies to emerge as a global player.

UrbanPiper had raised $24 million in Series B funding led by existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global, and new investors Swiggy & Zomato in April this year. Will you look at raising funds in the near future or is it adequate for now?

I think, we have enough to kind of build this business at the moment. We have our plans and like I said, our focus is to grow profitably. So even if you go into a country, it's not like we are opening 20 countries in one night. We' will have measured growth. We will see success and then start going.