ARAMARK Sells Stake In Online Food Ordering Service SeamlessWeb For $50M

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Private equity firm Spectrum Equity has acquired from ARAMARK a minority stake in SeamlessWeb, which offers an online and mobile food ordering service, for $50 million. Following the transaction, SeamlessWeb’s operations will be separated from those of ARAMARK.

SeamlessWeb CEO Jonathan Zabusky posits that the transaction enables the company to pursue accelerated expansion and product innovation, as well as ‘opportunistic’ acquisitions.

SeamlessWeb’s digital marketplace promotes, markets and connects local restaurants with business and consumer customers across multiple platforms.

Its restaurant network includes over 7,000 restaurants in 27 cities globally, including New York, London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the company claims over one million individuals have ordered through the platform to date.

Originally founded in 1999, the company says managed volume growth has is projected to exceed $400 million this year.

Spectrum Equity was founded in 1994 and has raised six investment funds, representing $4.7 billion of private equity capital, to date. Prior investments include Demand Media, SurveyMonkey, NetQuote and Ancestry.com.

Company: SeamlessWeb
Website: seamlessweb.com
Launch Date: December 1, 1999

SeamlessWeb is a web-based food ordering system that links companies and individuals with local restaurants, caterers and onsite dining providers. SeamlessWeb was founded in 1999 with the mission of providing companies, customers, and restaurants with an efficient and cost-effective method of purchasing and accounting for food. Since then, SeamlessWeb has become the industry leader in online food ordering, processing almost 1.5 million orders per month, and now services over 3,500 clients, 3,000 restaurant partners and over 500,000 individual users...

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