The End of the Line: Waitwhile, the Better Way to Manage Crowds

Announcing CRV’s Investment in Waitwhile

By Kristin Baker Spohn

Every year, Americans spend over 40 billion hours waiting in line. That’s an inordinate amount of wasted time at doctors’ offices, restaurants, pharmacies, the DMV and the many other places we typically visit every day. It’s not just a drain on our personal time. It’s an operations and customer service issue for companies that want to give their patients, shoppers and diners the best experience in their physical locations.

Waitwhile is on a mission to change this dynamic. Since launching, Waitwhile has helped thousands of companies, including Louis Vuitton, IKEA, Hartford HealthCare, Applebee’s, Patagonia, and many others, to revolutionize the wait experience for 80 million guests. Waitwhile has already saved over one million days of time that would have otherwise been wasted waiting in line. Today, I’m excited to share that CRV invested $12M as part of Waitwhile’s Series A and I’ll be joining the Board of Directors.

When I met Waitwhile’s founder, Chris Klemming, I was blown away by the elegant simplicity of the product, the breadth of use cases for a digital queue, and the steep adoption curve as companies embraced digital transformation through COVID. Up until CRV’s investment, Chris had self-funded the company with his brother, Jonas, to build a wait management platform that is loved by both consumers and businesses. The premise is simple. Guests can join a line through text, QR code, or web sign-up, and can then monitor their place in line while doing something else. Most importantly, in the background, the platform automatically learns about wait times, resource constraints, and guest preferences to help businesses reduce wait times and improve operations.

What impressed me most wasn’t just Chris’s ability to solve an immediate problem for companies — it was his broader vision. Customer flow management is the heart of every business, but it’s often disconnected with other parts of the organization. Both the parents of young kids, Chris and I talked about taking our families to Disneyland and how the “magic” of Disney was the ability to turn the line waiting experience into a feature. Using gamification, expectation management, and a digitally optimized workflow, there’s an opportunity to not only create a better experience for guests but improve business efficiency by integrating all of the touchpoints and systems along the guest journey. This infuses the “magic” of a digital queue into our daily lives.

The Waitwhile team has already made incredible strides and will look to accelerate their growth by expanding their technical team and focusing on enterprise-building.

Like Chris and Jonas, we want to see a world where waiting in line doesn’t feel like waiting at all, and we believe it’s possible with Waitwhile. We’re excited to partner with everyone at Waitwhile as they move into this next chapter. Welcome to the CRV family!