French startup Wynd just raised a $7.8 million Series A round (€7 million) for its comprehensive discovery, ordering, payment and reward solution for restaurants. This is a modern solution that can be tailored to your needs, brick by brick. It frees big restaurant chains from big software vendors who work for months on proprietary solutions.
Wynd targets big restaurant chains who already have a few solutions that haven’t been updated in a while and tend to be cumbersome. With existing solutions, their online ordering solutions are different from their in-store kiosks, stocks need to be manually updated. In other words, it’s a mess.
The startup uses a software-as-a-service solution to solve that. While Wynd provides everything you need, you can only use one brick of the entire platform. If you want to take online orders later down the road, you can then add another module to take care of that with Wynd. Your online ordering platform will then seamless integrate with your in-store orders. And everything is customizable.
Today’s funding round comes from Alven Capital with Orange Digital Ventures also participating. With the additional funding, the company plans to work on hiring more people, improving the product and being able to open up points of sale more quickly.
Wynd is both a consumer-facing and employee-facing solution. It integrates with kiosks, cash registers, kitchen screens, restaurant websites, delivery persons, etc. It is starting with restaurants as they are the hardest points of sale to manage. But you can expect Wynd for other type of stores in the future.
Wynd doesn’t handle payments directly but integrates with any payment service providers out there. Restaurants don’t have to switch to a new solution, and Wynd can focus on other aspects.
So far, the company has signed deals with Flunch, Elior, Nabab Kebab, Exki and more. Around 1,800 points of sale rely on Wynd. Most of them are in France so far with a few in Middle East and other European countries, but the company also plans a few international expansions in the coming months.
And of course, as the company uses a SaaS model, restaurants don’t have to make a big upfront payment and wait for months. There is an installation fee and a recurring fee, and it takes very little time to see how Wynd could work with your restaurant. If restaurants use the cash register module, Wynd takes a cut on transactions.
This fast approach is very attractive when it comes to selling the platform. And on the startup’s side, a monthly recurring revenue is very promising. Now, it remains to be confirmed whether the company can also convince independent restaurants and stores in the future as they represent a big part of the market.