Building the Backbone of On-Demand Food: Our Investment in Deliverect
By: Elliot Geidt and Jacob Effron
We’re thrilled to announce that Redpoint is investing in Deliverect’s $65M Series C. Deliverect integrates food delivery channels directly with restaurants and brands of all sizes to make taking online orders seamless for staff and their customers.
Spend five minutes with Deliverect CEO Zhong Xu, and it’s impossible to walk away unmoved by the challenges facing restaurants today. While we once associated food delivery with the consumer experience — like our excessive burrito orders — we have quickly learned the other side.
Restaurants today are overwhelmed with tablets. As food delivery apps have taken off, each provides restaurants with its own hardware. Orders have to be manually entered from one tablet into the restaurant’s own point-of-sale (POS) software. And want to change something on your menu? Do different things across different locations? Things get complicated and messy fast. This process all but ensures manual errors, slower delivery times, and a lack of visibility across channels. And it’s only been exacerbated as delivery has become even more important during the pandemic.
This problem exists for a reason. There are dozens of popular point-of-sale systems restaurants use. Mapping the details of menus (including what can be ordered in what combinations and when) is a complex data problem.
It’s a shame because there’s so much restaurants could do if they could more easily push a perfectly timed special to all their food delivery channels or integrate a QR code ordering application into their POS system.
Enter Deliverect
Deliverect solves this problem creating one seamless deep integration between digital ordering channels and POS systems worldwide. Started and headquartered out of Belgium, Deliverect is solving complex problems worldwide. They’ve powered Unilever to sell Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum ice cream across thousands of local distribution points and enabled restaurants to run four concepts out of a single location.
It would be impossible to think up a better team to solve this problem. Zhong grew up around the restaurant industry as his father built a POS for restaurants in Asia. Zhong first teamed up with Jan Hollez, one of Deliverect’s co-founders to build POSIOS, one of the first iPad cloud POS solutions. After POSIOS merged with Lightspeed, the two founded Deliverect alongside their colleague and SVP of EMEA Lightspeed Jerome Laredo and POS integration expert Jelte Vrijhoef. You’d be hard pressed to find a group of people with more knowledge about the details of menu data models and passion for helping small restaurants.
Plus the team moves fast. More than 10,000 establishments in over 30 markets worldwide are flocking to this solution and Deliverect has an ambitious roadmap ahead.
Our Partnership
At Redpoint, we love working with infrastructure businesses that enable a whole new wave of possibilities in an industry. We’re confident the Deliverect team is just scratching the surface of the number of restaurants they can impact and solutions they can provide restaurants.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Zhong and the Deliverect team and excited to join DST Global Partners, OMERS Ventures, Dave Sherry, Newion and Smartfin on this journey.
