Ireland’s Flipdish, headquartered in Dublin which offers an innovative online ordering and digital experience platform for hospitality, has just secured €87 million from Tencent. However, the latest brings the company value to €1 billion that saw the startup included in Europe’s 2022 unicorns list.
Tencent is understood to be Flipdish’s latest investor that is joining the existing investor – Tiger Global, Global Founders Capital, Growing Capital, Elkstone, and Enterprise Ireland.
Meanwhile, it should be borne in mind that the subject startup was founded in 2015 by brothers, Conor and James McCarthy, the startup is one that is structured to allow hospitality businesses to deliver seamless consumer digital experiences aimed at driving business growth. Flipdish provides technology that powers QR code order & pay-at-table, online ordering for collection & delivery, customer loyalty, self-service kiosks, and digital marketing.
Going with the current trend, its evident digitization is powering changes across sectors for a few years now, while the hospitality sector has so far seen significant acceleration of digital change due to the pandemic.
Flipdish co-founder and CEO ‘Conor McCarthy’ said: “Digitization has been transforming the hospitality sector for years. The ongoing pandemic has further accelerated the trend with hospitality businesses becoming increasingly dependent on digital experiences to attract and retain customers. Our investment will help us to empower more hospitality businesses around the world to grow with the best-in-class technology”.
The subject startup is currently operational in 25 countries across the globe, including France, Ireland, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US, Flipdish has both well-known brands coupled with independent restaurants as customers. Which is currently ahead of Irish brands Dunnes Stores, Base Pizza, Romayo’s, and Bombay Pantry are among clients, and international companies such as Subway, Cojean, and Galeries Lafayette are understood to be using the Flipdish product.
In addition to that, Ireland’s Flipdish equally works with a number of the world’s largest ghost kitchen companies, which partner with the likes of TGI Friday’s, Dickey’s BBQ Pit, White Castle, and more.
In 2021, Flipdish witnessed a tremendous boom and its revenue grew across multiple markets. However, it was figured out that the company’s growth was not just fuelled by a move to digitalization, but rather as a result of a trend amongst restauranteurs to offer their online ordering capability in house, rather than relying on a food delivery marketplace, which is also based on the rapid adoption of Flipdish’s on-premise solutions such as QR Code Order & Pay coupled with the growth of exciting new verticals like dark kitchens.
As part of its ambition to fuel the local economy in a bid to support local restaurants with their tech, the Flipdish team is disrupting the digital food-ordering industry. In view of this, the young company recently launched a Support Local, Order Direct campaign – with the intention to make consumers more aware of how to order directly from restaurants, while ensuring that a majority of profits is received by independent kitchens and money is funneled back into the economy.
The new investment will be used to grow global operations, fund R&D in products that improve the hospitality industry’s digital experience for consumers, and support new customers like stadia, cinemas, and airports. While this development marks an exciting beginning of 2022 for the subject startup, it is also poised to hire an additional 700 people in 2022, notably in the areas of tech – software architects, data scientists, engineers, and product designers.
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