Welcome Bikky to the Equal Ventures Portfolio

At Equal, we love partnering with founders that are building verticalized software platforms. We believe that there are many markets and sectors that have important nuances that horizontal solutions are unable to fully capture, and the restaurant industry is no exception. 

Over the past decade, online restaurant ordering and delivery have exploded in popularity. As demand grew, delivery service platforms like Grubhub, Doordash, and UberEats gained prominence, with the promise of streamlining delivery operations and helping restaurants find new customers. However, as the market share of these ordering platforms grew, they began to disintermediate the end consumer from the restaurant, cutting into the restaurants’ margins with a 15% - 30% take rate for their services. Ultimately, these services began cannibalizing a restaurant’s existing customer base rather than finding them new customers. Beyond delivery, the growth of in-store ordering technology like loyalty apps, kiosks, and QR codes has transformed the traditional relationship between restaurants and guests. Today, a third of all orders are digital, up nearly 3x since before the pandemic.

The digitization of the industry means that restaurants today have more customer data than at any point in their history. This data represents a massive opportunity for merchants to finally understand who their customers are, what they're doing, and how it impacts their business. However, despite the new ways to order and pay at restaurants, much of the data is still trapped in legacy systems that don't integrate with one another. Enter Bikky.

Bikky is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) for the restaurant industry. Bikky integrates into a restaurant’s consumer-facing ordering platforms (online and offline) to unify customer data across channels. Solving for the restaurant industry’s data problem requires a vertically focused solution because of the fragmentation across not only digital channels, but offline channels, where the vast majority of restaurant transactions occur.

Restaurants need a CDP that can not only help them overcome customer data silos, but also take a restaurant’s insights, data orchestration, and activation to the level of a digitally native company. That means moving beyond just pushing data from one place to another like a traditional CDP, and instead providing a way to create and maintain persistent customer profiles, execute experiments, improve targeting, and power acquisition and retention.

Bikky synthesizes proprietary data across ordering channels into customer profiles, provides visibility on customer retention, frequency, and lifetime value, and establishes workflows to automate marketing/retention and increase personalization. Even the most sophisticated restaurants would typically have to use dozens of systems and hours of manual analysis to replicate this type of capability. While built for restaurants of all sizes, Bikky brings this capability down to even the smallest of restaurants, giving them the tools to understand and own the customer relationship.

Perhaps the most compelling reason behind this opportunity is founder & CEO, Abhinav Kapur. Abhinav spent the majority of his career in investment banking and equity research but saw the challenges that his mother-in-law faced while she ran Amma, an Indian restaurant in NYC. Abhinav bootstrapped the company for multiple years, honing the product alongside customers like his mother-in-law. Today Bikky works with >60 restaurant customers across hundreds of locations, including leading brands like Eggs Up Grill, Groucho's Deli, 16 Handles, 5 Napkin Burger, Boqueria, and INDAY.

We are beyond excited to lead Bikky’s $5.25M seed round and help support the restaurant industry and are fortunate to have Version One Ventures, Gutter Capital and several restaurant industry executives as co-investors. 

Visit https://www.bikky.com/ to learn more!

*Read this on Medium here