Announcing Our Follow-On Investment in Cartwheel
We are thrilled to announce Cartwheel’s latest funding round, led by Chingona Ventures and Act One Ventures. Cartwheel is a hybrid delivery management software for restaurants, catering businesses, and beyond that provides full control over delivery capacity, visibility, costs, and brand identity. With this latest round, Cartwheel welcomed new investors and advisors. Our General Partner, Samara Mejia Hernandez, will assume a board observer seat.
Cartwheel was founded by Alex Vasilkin, Magdim Metshin, and Dan Zamylin, who have over a decade of experience in restaurants and delivery operations. Before launching Cartwheel, the founding team ran a restaurant and started a delivery service that served over 300 customers, becoming Yelp Eat 24’s highest-ranking partner nationwide. After seeking software solutions to effectively manage and scale their operations and discovering that it did not exist, they decided to build software better suited to their needs. Eventually, restaurants began reaching out and requesting to license the software the founding team had built.
Today, Cartwheel offers delivery management tools such as auto-dispatching, smart routing, and proof of delivery, alongside a marketing suite to control the brand experience during delivery. It also provides reporting tools to manage fleets and integrates with commonly used point-of-sale systems, online ordering solutions, marketplaces, and delivery partners. Its clients include P.F. Changs and iconic Chicago-brands like Potbelly, Lou Malnati’s, Portillo’s, and more.
In addition to the founding team’s experience, we were excited about the product’s vision and how it solved a pain point faced by today’s restaurant operators following our new norms of dining. As we discussed previously in a Crunchbase article, the way we dine and interact with restaurants has changed dramatically over the past decade. Technological solutions now allow consumers to make reservations and food orders online, enabling a digital and tech-enabled food experience.
For restaurants, venture-backed solutions have been deployed across their point of sale, online reservations, food ordering, and delivery fulfillment. These solutions have created operating challenges as restaurants try to manage ordering, dine-in, and back-of-house operations and software simultaneously. With delivery alone, restaurants may be managing several delivery solutions, such as multifleet, crowdsourced fleets, in-house fleets, and curbside pickup. As such, we believe the next wave of innovation in the consumer-facing food space will center around ease and operational efficiency, with a focus on cost management and a positive consumer experience.
Cartwheel fits within this vision perfectly. Cartwheel’s rules engine allows restaurants to easily orchestrate delivery across drivers based on highly customizable rules. In addition to the ease of oversight, the Cartwheel platform turns delivery, which is a critical customer touchpoint for satisfaction and churn, into a spotlight moment for the brand. Cartwheel’s delivery solution allows for branded order tracking pages, promotional banners for online customers, and a Google Reviews integration which can allow restaurants to proactively resolve customer concerns.
Cartwheel falls within Chingona’s investment focus as an early-stage company enhancing technology-enabled operational efficiency in the food sector. The team is uniquely suited to improve delivery orchestration for restaurants and consumers. With this additional round of capital, Cartwheel will continue refining its best-in-class product and executing solutions for enterprise customers. We have worked closely with the Cartwheel team since our initial investment and are excited to double down as a co-lead for their latest round.
Congratulations, again, to the Cartwheel team! You can learn more about Cartwheel here.
ABOUT CARTWHEEL
Cartwheel is an enterprise delivery management platform for restaurants and beyond. Cartwheel’s delivery management platform powers dozens of NRN’s Top 500 enterprise brands, including Portillo’s (also the first minority stakeholder investor), P.F. Chang’s, Potbelly and Lou Malnati’s. With native integrations to leading partner platforms including Olo and ezCater, Cartwheel manages Hybrid Delivery, 3rd-party partnerships with national and 50+ local DSPs, and catering delivery, helping brands increase repeat orders.
ABOUT CHINGONA VENTURES
Chingona Ventures invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies in often-overlooked markets, partnering with founders at the earliest stages of development. The firm seeks to invest in financial technology, food technology, future-of-learning, future, and health/wellness companies based in the United States.
