UberEats bought this SA tech startup
CAPE TOWN - UberEats has today announced that it acquired South African restaurant technology company owned by venture capital firm Knife Capital, orderTalk.
This acquisition is a major step for UberEats which will be able to streamline workflows by directly integrating with leading point of sale (POS) systems.
Knife Capital which leads a business model that sells off companies has sold orderTalk in order to secure significant returns.
“An exit is part of the standard business model for any VC. We invest with the intention to secure significant returns for our entrepreneurs and investors and trade sales are the most common way to generate such returns. The time was right and so was the offer by Uber. It therefore made sense to exit”, said Knife Capital.
Picture: Knife Capital. (Supplied).
orderTalk which is the original provider of online ordering systems for restaurants worldwide, utilises proprietary remote ordering software including mobile and social media applications.
The start-up, which was founded by Hilton Keats in 1998 was backed by an online ordering software development partnership with a United States restaurant chain.
In 2004, lawyer Patrick Eldon joined the group and opened its Cape Town office a year later.
orderTalk then received a R9 million investment in 2008 from Knife Capital which is owned by internet billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth to scale the business internationally.
“Raising capital by way of the investment made by HBD provided enormous value, not only in tangible but also intangible terms. The strategic support, mentoring, advice and hands-on assistance received from HBD and Knife Capital over the years of the investment have been invaluable”, said CEO of orderTalk, Patrick Eldon.
Picture: orderTalk CEO, Patrick Eldon. (Supplied).
Although Knife Capital said that they would love to disclose the sale of the acquisition, for strategic reasons from Uber’s side: 'Terms of the deal were not disclosed’.
“Since they are the main player in this acquisition and not to compromise orderTalk’s new path/ partnership, we respect that and choose not to disclose anything that is not in the public domain”, said Knife Capital.
Meanwhile, the uberEats business which works with over 100,000 restaurants in 200 cities in 35 countries said that POS integration on a large scale is challenging. This is the reason they acquired orderTalk.
According to Uber Eats head of business development, Liz Meyerdirk, this acquisition will give rise to greater efficiency and essentially less errors that arise with manual labour and to streamline workflow.
“With orderTalk’s engineering talent and the group of people that we’re acquiring, we’ll be able to supercharge our own point of sale integration strategy”, said Meyerdirk.