Tock raises $7.5M to Accelerate the Growth of its Restaurant Booking and Analytics Platform
Chicago, IL (October 4th, 2016) — Tock announced today it has raised $7.5M in its first round of institutional capital. The investment was led by Origin Ventures with participation from leading restaurateurs, chefs and hospitality groups, including Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and Will Guidara and Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park. The new funding will enable the rapidly growing company to expand into new markets and continue building its product offerings for restaurants and hospitality providers.
Tock is a comprehensive software solution that helps restaurants sell and manage bookings in advance. Tock enables restaurants to offer a variety of different booking types, such as fully pre-paid tickets, ordinary reservations, private dining, and special events. By utilizing Tock, restaurants are able to shift demand, lower labor costs and food waste, reduce no-shows to nearly zero, dynamically price and eliminate the cost of accepting reservations over the phone. Since launching last year, Tock has processed over $102 million in pre-paid bookings and seated over 1 million restaurant patrons spanning nine countries.
“We are thrilled to have Origin Ventures as our lead investor,” said Tock CEO and co-founder, Nick Kokonas. “Having led the first two institutional funding rounds in GrubHub, Origin is the perfect partner for Tock. They helped GrubHub grow from a company with five employees operating only in Chicago to the national brand that owns the online restaurant delivery industry.”
Over the last 12 years, Nick, along with acclaimed chef Grant Achatz, has built some of the finest — and most daring — restaurants in the world, including Alinea, Next, The Aviary and Roister. Tock was inspired by Nick’s refusal to settle for the many widely-accepted drawbacks of the restaurant business.
“We believe that Tock is another transformational company in the restaurant industry,” said Origin Ventures partner Jason Heltzer. “Tock proved that ticketing works at Nick’s restaurants. Tock’s innovative booking methods and dynamic pricing capabilities have attracted all types of restaurants as customers.”
According to its co-founder, Brian Fitzpatrick, the former head of Google’s Chicago engineering office, “Tock has sought to embrace a combination of restaurant industry domain expertise with a commitment to original design and technical engineering. Every single piece of Tock’s software has been designed and built in-house. We believe that doing things by the book is usually a recipe for failure and that a bit of irreverence and risk-taking is necessary to create change. We are committed to being the leading software company at the intersection of technology and hospitality.”
Will Guidara, co-owner of Eleven Madison Park in New York, said, “We’ve always believed that technology doesn’t have a place in a fine dining restaurant, and since 2006 we’ve worked hard to remove it as completely as possible from the guest experience. But times have changed — over the past year we have worked tirelessly to figure out the best partner to work with, and we found that in Tock. We wanted desperately to find a group of people with an understanding of the tech world, but who also really understood the restaurant world. We are so impressed with what Tock has created that, not only have we decided to use Tock at Eleven Madison Park, but we decided to invest in the company as well.”
About Tock
Tock is a comprehensive software solution that enables restaurants to sell and manage bookings in advance. The solution helps restaurants shift demand, lower labor costs and food waste, reduce no-shows to nearly zero, dynamically price and eliminate the cost of accepting reservations over the phone. For more information, visit www.tocktix.com.
About Origin Ventures
Origin Ventures is a leading venture capital firm that collaborates with ambitious founders to build high-growth, innovative, category-defining technology companies. Founded in 1999, Origin is composed entirely of former operators and engineers with extensive venture investing experience. The firm’s realized performance places it in the top 5% of VC firms nationally. For more information, visit www.originventures.com.
