Just Eat, the online takeout ordering giant, has invested in U.K. startup Flypay, which has built a platform to help restaurant and pub chains in a much-needed consolidation of their technology solutions. The funding was worth £3.5 million and became an extension to the company’s previous Series A that raked in £7 million led by media brand TimeOut.
Flypay is a startup that was created to improve customer experiences across the hospitality industry. The business creates solutions that significantly mitigate the inconvenience around eating and drinking out in restaurants, pubs and bars, with the ultimate aim of ensuring that a customer’s time flows more smoothly. It accomplished this by letting customers pay for food and drinks at their table in less than one minute. Customers can also start a tab through the Flypay app, order and pay at the table for their meals, jump the queue when going for takeout and take advantage of customer loyalty initiatives.
In 2016, Flypay launched the Flyt platform to solve what is perhaps the number one problems in the world of hospitality technology- linking up the numerous different services used by an operator. Flyt is an innovative technology platform, one that is designed to effortlessly link everything together. It will enable integration between numerous technology based services, from bookings and loyalty, right through to delivery and reviews.
Flypay founder and CEO Tom Weaver, in a statement to TechCrunch, said,
For hospitality operators, our new Flyt platform aims to make it significantly easier to innovate around digital commerce, both in terms of integrating technologies across the customer journey… into their own apps, as well as connecting into the biggest aggregator apps and other platforms, such as messaging, voice commerce and who-knows-what’s-next.
In its first year of business, Flypay was named one of the UK’s top 100 most innovative startups by Smarta/O2. The Retail Awards in 2015 awarded Flypay the Mobile Payment Solution of the Year and in 2016, and the company was also recognised as one of the UK’s most innovative businesses by Bloomberg. This newest investment is also seen as a “strategic partnership”, with Just Eat becoming the latest tech partner on Flypay’s Flyt platform.
He further explained that their customers are mainstream casual dining and pubs brands. They currently work with clients like Wahaca, GBK, Jamie’s Italian, Fuller’s, Chilango, and many others. Also, they have recently signed one of the most popular restaurant brands in the U.K., to be announced shortly, to create some uniquely different experiences.
To meet this goal, Just Eat and Flypay plan to collaborate on digital experiences for operators across the casual dining sector. This will enable Flypay to integrate delivery into restaurant and bars’ own apps, powered by Flyt. But that’s only the beginning. Also in the pipeline are plans to offer Just Eat’s customer base access to in-restaurant experiences, and to work together to make it easier for restaurant, pub and bar operators to adopt and utilise delivery technology.
Time Out’s chief executive Julio Bruno also had something to say:
For Time Out this is a strategic investment in the future of our mobile B2B solutions for enterprise and hospitality clients. We believe it will enable us to integrate more closely with partners in the leisure and hospitality space and this will allow us to monetise businesses – one of our key strategic objectives.
Restaurant goers and pub-hoppers, look out for the latest in revolutionary hospitality!
