Investment Notes: Restoplus

Restaurants face higher expectations than ever. The pandemic has made it mandatory for them to offer multiple service methods, which often requires partnering with new providers and systems. With every new provider, restaurant and cafe owners lose more visibility and control of their supply chain, and vital data for running a profitable hospitality business slips away.

Restoplus aims to place that control and visibility back in the hands of restaurant and café owners. Founded by Ezhil Mohan and Nish Sowdri, Restoplus’s platform provides everything from a branded website and mobile app to a point-of-sale (POS) system to a commission-free delivery service, direct integration with Google to offer Google Food Ordering - all under a vertically integrated solution.

The Investible Early Stage Fund 2 led Restoplus’ ~AU$1m Seed round with participation from Adrian Di Marco, Nick Glenning, and renowned Australian chef Maggie Beer. In these investment notes, we’ll explore why the disaggregation of service providers is a limiter for restaurants, how Restoplus puts the power back in the hands of restauranteurs, and why we backed this team. ‍

Solving the common pain points of hospitality solutions

"There are many different ways to order food in a typical restaurant -walk-ins, phone orders, Uber Eats, in-restaurant QR codes... However, if you ask a restaurant owner a simple question such as 'How many burgers did you sell last week?', they may not know the answer because the data is siloed across various systems and database," explains Ezhil.

Many restaurants use a variety of software solutions from different vendors to manage their operations. For example, an average restaurant might use UberEats for deliveries, Square for its point-of-sale system, Wordpress for its website, Mr Yum for QR code ordering etc. Restoplus allows you to manage all of these functions (and more) in one place.

Over the past three years, the digital storefront has become equally as important as the physical store. However, current existing solutions typically target only one vertical in the restaurant management system suite and do not communicate well with other systems. With data spread across multiple databases, it is challenging for restaurant operators to make data-driven decisions and improve their operational efficiencies.

Restoplus is bridging the gap between physical and online storefronts by unifying their software suite into a single codebase that manages the entire front-of-house operations. This approach provides small to medium businesses with access to the sophisticated IT infrastructure and capabilities enjoyed by large enterprises.‍

The entire hospitality software experience under one umbrella

The Restoplus platform provides restaurant managers with a comprehensive suite of tools all in one place. This includes a custom-branded website and mobile app, a point-of-sale (POS) system, QR code table ordering, table reservation, commission-free delivery service, direct integration with Google Reserve (Google Food Ordering), a fully integrated digital loyalty card across all touchpoints, and more. This centralisation empowers restaurant operators to engage directly with customers, rebuilding the customer goodwill that has eroded due to third-party delivery services.

By gaining control over the entire product suite, restaurants can track and analyse every customer interaction in one database. With increased visibility, restaurants obtain insights into consumer preferences and behaviours, something its vertical competitors lack the ability to do.

While technology has enabled the industry to reinvent itself in the past decade, restaurant owners still face massive challenges. Ezhil and Nish have a laser-focused customer-first mindset that demonstrates they’re the perfect team to capitalise on this market opportunity.

Hustling founders

Ezhil and Nish, childhood friends and successful professionals, migrated to Australia from India and worked their way up the ranks of companies such as Westpac and Portalink. Prior to entering the banking sector, Ezhil worked in various roles in the hospitality industry for over five years, including as a cafe operator, where he gained hands-on domain knowledge of the industry.

While enjoying their respective successful careers, both Ezhil and Nish had their eyes on entrepreneurship from a very young age. (Their first business idea was to open a fusion restaurant when they were only 14 years old. However, the idea was fiercely rejected by everyone around them - "fortunately", says Ezhil).

They saw an opportunity in the hospitality industry where most solutions addressed one problem at a time. However, new problems kept emerging, as most competitors approached this as a short term opportunity. Ezhil and Nish had a much larger vision: making Restoplus the one-stop-shop for any restaurant software needs.

The founders identified an unaddressed frustration by restaurant owners that they were committed to solving. With Ezhil’s finance experience from years with Westpac and Nish’s background as a software architect at various IT companies, the founders already had the makeup of a tech company duo.  

The founders are talented and motivated people, with a dialled-in vision in all they do. With only $250k of external funding, they have built a business that generates annual recurring revenue multiple times greater than their initial investment.

We are thrilled to be part of Restoplus' journey, to empower restaurant owners worldwide by transforming complicated software systems into a simple yet powerful tool of the trade.