TouchBistro Raises CDN $16.3 million in Series C Financing, Led by Napier Park Financial Partners and Japan-based Recruit Holdings
Marketwired
TORONTO, ONTARIO and NEW YORK, NEW YORK--(Marketwired - May 31, 2017) - TouchBistro today announced that it has raised CDN $16.3 million in Series C funding. The latest round was led by Napier Park Financial Partners ("Napier Park") and Recruit Holdings Co, Ltd ("Recruit"), with participation from existing investors, including BDC IT Venture Fund,Relay Ventures, and Kensington Capital Partners. The funding will be used to enhance and expand the industry-leading feature set in the TouchBistro iPad mobile restaurant point-of-sale (mPOS) solution, and to facilitate the company's expansion into global markets. This latest round brings TouchBistro's total funding to date to CDN $45.3 million.
TouchBistro is the top-grossing iPad POS app in 37 countries. In the last year, the company has grown its recurring monthly revenue by 150 percent and deployed more than 15,000 iPads in over 9,000 restaurants around the world. TouchBistro POS solutions process Gross Merchandise Volumes of almost US $5 billion annually.
"We have experienced significant growth over the past year and plan to continue on this exciting trajectory," said Alex Barrotti, founder and CEO of TouchBistro. "Bringing together Napier Park, a Fin-Tech payments expert, and Recruit, a restaurant behemoth, in this transaction together with our existing investors, positions us well to capture an even larger share of the emerging restaurant mPOS market."
Recruit is a global company with more than 45,000 employees, 1,839 billion JPY (US $16.5 billion) in annual revenue and more than 200 brands, including Hot Pepper Gourmet, the largest restaurant coupon and reservation service in Japan, with 100,000+ restaurants.
"With its world-class technology and visionary leadership team, TouchBistro fits perfectly within our investment portfolio of innovative companies embarking on game-changing opportunities," said Mikihito Kawanami, Division Director at Recruit Holdings. "We are business builders at heart and appreciate TouchBistro's vision for restaurant success when their exceptional mobile platform functions as the heart of the restaurant's operations."
Mizuho Hiraguri from Recruit Holdings will join the TouchBistro Board of Directors as an observer.
Napier Park is a leading FinTech-focused growth equity firm with a long history investing in payments companies. It has an estimated $7.9 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2017.
"We back best-in-class platforms with leading management teams, and welcome this opportunity to invest in Alex and the TouchBistro team," said Daniel Kittredge Managing Director at Napier Park. "We have been highly impressed by TouchBistro's leadership team, product, and technology and believe they will continue to deliver a simple, secure, and sophisticated point-of-sale solution to the restaurant market."
As part of the transaction, Daniel Kittredge will join TouchBistro's Board of Directors.
The TouchBistro iPad mPOS is designed specifically to help restaurants increase their sales, improve the customer experience, and make informed decisions to profitably grow their business. By mobilizing the point of sale, TouchBistro has revolutionized restaurant operations. With just a tap, servers can enter table-side orders and send them directly to the kitchen for preparation without running back and forth. Food pictures, allergen information, and forced modifiers that tell serving staff what to upsell and list food preparation variations are all at the server's fingertips, eliminating guesswork, errors or missed opportunities. Secure, integrated EMV payments can also be taken at the table. With TouchBistro's patented design, even complex actions like bill splitting or combining orders from different seats require only a tap or swipe.
By simplifying tasks and reducing serving time, TouchBistro has proven to markedly increase table turns and sales.
GCA Advisors, LLC. acted as the exclusive financial advisor to TouchBistro in connection with this transaction.
About TouchBistro
TouchBistro is an iPad mobile point of sale (mPOS) for restaurants that helps increase sales, improve customer experience, and make better business decisions. TouchBistro is used by thousands of restaurants world-wide and is perfect for all foodservice business types including restaurants, bars, cafes, breweries, food trucks, and quick service restaurants. It has been named by Business Daily News as the 2017 Best POS for Restaurants, for the third consecutive year. The TouchBistro app has been ranked as the top-grossing food and beverage app in 37 countries on the Apple® App Store(SM). TouchBistro offers a 30-day free trial that can be converted to a no-contract subscription. TouchBistro has offices in New York, Toronto, Chicago, and Austin. Additional information is available at www.touchbistro.com.
About Napier Park
Napier Park is the private equity group of Napier Park Global Capital, an alternative asset management platform with nearly $8 billion in assets under management. Napier Park focuses on investing in innovative, high growth companies at the intersection of financial services and technology-enabled products and services. Napier Park targets investments of $5 million to $30 million, with current and prior portfolio companies spanning the following industry subsectors -- Payments, Banking and Lending, Insurance and Benefits, Asset and Wealth Management, and Business Services and Outsourcing. For more information, visit www.napierparkglobal.com/private-equity.
About Recruit Group
Founded in 1960, the Recruit Group creates and provides platforms that connect companies and consumers. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, the Group is operating a wide range of services, including HR technology, housing and real estate, bridal, travel, dining, beauty, recruitment advertisement, employment placement, staffing and others. The Group has more than 45,000 employees and operates in more than 60 countries. For more information, visit http://www.recruit-rgf.com/
