Food Delivery Giants Swiggy & Zomato Invest In UrbanPiper’s $24 Mn Funding Round

B2B SaaS startup UrbanPiper has raised $24 Mn in Series B funding led by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Swiggy and Zomato. 

A slew of angel investors also participated in the round including Pankaj Chaddah (Shyft), Ankit Nagori (Curefoods), Saahil Goel and Vishesh Khurana (Shiprocket), Khadim Bhatti  and Vara Kumar (Whatfix), among others, according to a statement.  

The Bengaluru-based startup plans to use the funds to scale its product and engineering teams, strengthen the platform capabilities, as well as broaden offerings to enable more services to restaurants. 

So far, UrbanPiper has raised about $32 Mn in funding various rounds, Saurabh Gupta, CEO, UrbanPiper told Inc42. 

The startup aims to become a single window to help restaurants run their entire operations and bring a suite of digital offerings together to ensure all the commerce workflows for a restaurant can happen seamlessly in a simple and intuitive way. 

Meanwhile, foodtech giant Zomato invested around $5 Mn in UrbanPiper for a 5% stake in January 2022, according to its filing as seen by Inc42.

The startup claims to process more than 18% of all online food orders placed each month in India, and has achieved 10X growth over the past two years.

Founded in 2015 by Saurabh Gupta, Anirban Majumdar, and Manav Gupta, UrbanPiper helps restaurants to integrate and manage multiple delivery platforms in a single dashboard and provides an API to connect with existing POS. 

It is building a full-stack restaurant management platform that helps restaurants operate and scale their businesses with minimal hassle. 

Currently, a restaurant signs up with an average of 6-10 different online channels/aggregators, making it challenging to manage multiple tablets/dashboards. Through UrbanPiper, restaurants can integrate all these aggregators onto a single dashboard and connect it with their points of sale resulting in a 70% decrease in order failure, as per its statement. 

“The restaurant industry is growing at an exponential rate, offering us a huge opportunity to create value and shape the next generation of restaurant businesses. With this investment, we will continue to widen UrbanPiper’s offerings to meet more digital opportunities in the restaurant ecosystem, along with bolstering our platform capabilities,” said Gupta.  

The startup currently processes 14 Mn orders per month, which equates to about $750 Mn of estimated order value annually. The startup, which has more than 150 employees in India, plans to increase its headcount to over 250 in the next year. 

“Due to pandemic-led disruptions, merchants now increasingly want to adopt digital channels and upgrade their operations. UrbanPiper is at the forefront of this digital transformation and is strategically positioned to build infrastructure connecting digital players to merchants in the F&B ecosystem. Sequoia Capital is excited to deepen the partnership with UrbanPiper as it builds further on its mission to empower restaurants globally, and welcome Zomato and Swiggy to this partnership,” said Shraeyansh Thakur, principal, Sequoia India.

The startup’s user base includes several marquee restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway, Cure Foods, Taco Bell, and Rebel Foods. 

Meanwhile, the Indian SaaS ecosystem is rapidly growing in the past few years. According to a Motilal Oswal report, the country’s SaaS ecosystem is expected to grow rapidly and increase its share of global SaaS to 4-5% from nearly 1% at present, translating to a $50-70 Bn revenue opportunity by CY 2030. 

Furthermore, in March 2022, OSlash, a SaaS startup raised $5 Mn at a valuation of $50 Mn in a post-seed funding round from over 40 operators. 

Draup, a B2B SaaS startup, raised $20 Mn last month from US-based private equity firm HKW to accelerate its AI capabilities and expand product portfolio.

Witnessing a lot of scope in SaaS vertical, Ola’s cofounder Ankit Bhati is going to launch a SaaS venture. The newly started venture will raise upto $20 Mn from Sequoia Capital as part of its seed funding round.

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