Plate IQ, which helps restaurants manage their food inventory and pay their bills more efficiently, has closed $4M in seed funding led by Eileses Capital. Thousands of top-tier restaurants across the U.S. use Plate IQ; including, Nobu, Thomas Keller Group (The French Laundry), Mixt, Vino Volo, Quince, Tender Greens, Thomas Keller Group, The Plant Cafe, and NOHO. Other investors include Initialized Capital, Restaurant Groups, Y-combinator Continuity Fund and Tamares Group. The investment will be used to expand into additional markets.
Plate IQ platform transforms back-office operations with accounts payable automation, food costs analytics, bill pay, inventory and recipe costing tools. Plate IQ processes over 150,000 invoices worth more than $50M each month, tracks prices of over 500K SKUs from 14,000 vendors.
“We’re fundamentally changing how restaurants operate. Ultimately, our goal is to completely remove all of the manual and costly back-office work, enabling restaurants to focus all their time and energy on delivering an outstanding customer experience,” says Bhavuk Kaul, CEO at Plate IQ
Technology solutions for the restaurant industry mostly focus on the front of the house. They tend to help with deliveries or fixing point-of-sale systems or building customer loyalty programs.
Restaurants still rely on paper, Excel spreadsheets, fax machines and manual data entry to keep track of their accounts, invoices and food inventory. By providing automation solutions and integrating with a broad group of vendors and existing accounting software, Plate IQ significantly reduces the amount of tedious manual back office work required for any restaurant operation.
Restaurants typically are a low margin businesses, averaging a 5 percent profit margin in the U.S., with fragmented supply chains and high-turn over inventory, receiving deliveries daily. Each delivery is accompanied by a paper invoice. Plate IQ digitizes the invoices and analyzes that information, helping restaurants understand their food costs on a near real-time basis. Plate IQ can alert restaurant operators at a SKU-level when vendor costs change, enabling the team to adjust quickly.
In a sea of technology products for restaurants that bombard us every day, Plate IQ stands alone as a true game changer for prime cost control and back office operational efficiency. Unleashing the immediate analytics of our day to day purchasing has proven to be invaluable for us,” says Joshua Pickard, CEO at Noho Hospitality Group
Next Plate IQ wants to work closely with suppliers like Sysco, US foods etc. to build an integrated solution for restaurants to talk to suppliers and vice versa.
