Osage Venture Partners is thrilled to announce that we’ve led an oversubscribed $10.5M Series A funding round for Incentivio alongside Ardent Ventures, Grotech Ventures, Data Point Capital, and Blue Tree Venture Fund. The company is charting the future of restaurant management through its AI-powered software suite that helps operators gain a deeper understanding of their guests, enhance customer engagement, boost guest retention, and increase restaurant margins.
The restaurant industry has long grappled with understanding the guest journey to deliver personalized and profitable guest experiences, but restaurants have lacked the data and digital touchpoints to do so, resulting in missed revenue opportunities and high guest churn rates of up to 70%.
As a result, the restaurant technology landscape has become disjointed, characterized by the adoption of disparate solutions such as marketing software, digital ordering systems, loyalty programs, and guest data management tools. This fragmentation has led to a lack of system connectivity, inefficient operations, and frustrating guest experience, issues further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as restaurants hastily adopted technology without a clear long-term strategy. Incentivio addresses these challenges by offering a comprehensive suite of tools including white-labeled mobile apps, online ordering, digital gift cards, loyalty programs, customer data platforms, analytics, marketing, churn management, upsell programs, and guest journey management. Its all-in-one approach enables restaurant owners to enhance customer experiences, optimize marketing ROI, and streamline operations. The platform integrates seamlessly with existing systems, eliminates laborious data collection, simplifies marketing campaigns, and incorporates digital orders into restaurant workflows. With AI and machine learning algorithms, Incentivio provides personalized automation of guest experiences and vital business intelligence to inform future strategies.
At the close of our investment, Incentivio boasted almost 2,000 restaurant locations across North America actively utilizing their platform, with a comparable number of locations in the onboarding process. Demonstrating exciting growth, the company’s revenue has surged over 100% year on year, fortified by technology and GTM partnerships with industry-leading entities such as Toast, Square, NCC, Lightspeed, Revel, Clover, Brink, Silverware, and QuPOS among others. Incentivio operates in the expansive global restaurant management software market, which is currently valued at $4.5B and expects to grow at a CAGR of 16.3% over the next 8 years. Incentivio is primarily focused on the US and Canadian restaurant markets, which comprise over 700,000 and 100,000 locations respectively. As a result, we foresee Incentivio tapping into an estimated annual Total Addressable Market (TAM) worth well over $1B.
Incentivio’s success is driven by a remarkable executive team, with each member bringing diverse skill sets and backgrounds in technology, go-to-market leadership, and restaurants. The Co-Founder and CEO, Rajat Bhakhri, boasts a two-decade-long track record of leading large organizations in developing scalable technology platforms. Working alongside Rajat is a stellar team that includes Co-Founder and COO Sash Dias, VP of Engineering Lilupa Munindradasa, VP of Sales and Partnerships Michael Addison, Head of Implementation and Customer Success Richard Long, Head of Product Mat Todtenkopf and Head of Marketing Sam Kusinitz. The team’s industry expertise and customer-centric approach have nurtured a company culture that we at Osage are proud to invest behind. Their mix of business building experience and domain expertise, coupled with this culture, convince us that Incentivio has the potential to mature into the leading digital guest engagement platform for restaurants.
We eagerly anticipate partnering with the Incentivio team in realizing that vision.