It was a day of brand new firsts in the Indian startup-land, as food delivery arch rivals Zomato and Swiggy, both invested in Bengaluru based restaurant management SaaS company UrbanPiper. The series B round, which totalled at $24 Mn, was led by existing backers Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global. For both of them, the investment is a strategic one considering the alignment between theirs and UrbanPiper’s line of business.
In addition to the above mentioned investors, the upstart also attracted some angel investment, highlighted by Pankaj Chaddah (Co-Founder, Zomato, Shyft) and Ankit Nagori (Founder, Curefoods).
Saurabh Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, UrbanPiper, said “With this investment, we will continue to widen UrbanPiper’s offerings, to meet many more digital opportunities in the restaurant ecosystem, along with bolstering our platform capabilities.”
UrbanPiper, founded in 2015 by Manav Gupta, Saurav Gupta and Anirban Majumdar, provides a full stack business management solution to restaurant owners. Since most restaurants are listed on multiple food delivery apps, it is a rather tedious undertaking to manage orders on separate dashboards from each app. UrbanPiper provides a solution to this problem by offering a platform that integrates all these food apps into one place and makes managing orders easier. The platform also allows restaurant owners the flexibility to introduce their own discounts and promotions, make changes to the pricing, etc.
UrbanPiper already partners with about 27,000 restaurant in India and seven other countries, with plans to increase that number to 200,000 in the next two years. Their presence is marked in the middle East and North Africa. The app processes over 14 million orders a month, a huge increase from their 2019 figure of about 2 million.
“Due to pandemic-led disruptions, merchants now increasingly want to adopt digital channels and upgrade their operations. UrbanPiper is at the forefront of this digital transformation and is strategically positioned to build infrastructure connecting digital players to merchants in the F&B ecosystem. Sequoia Capital India is excited to deepen the partnership with the UrbanPiper team as they build further on their mission to empower restaurants globally, and welcome Zomato and Swiggy to this partnership.”, Mr. Gupta added, addressing newfound investors Swiggy and Zomato.
It is worthy to be noted that while there have been talks in the past surrounding Swiggy and Zomato joining forces to fund a bike taxi start-up Rapido, they did not lead to fruition.
