Restaurant operating system SALIDO is prudently plotting for growth after raising $2 million in funds as its client base expands.
The operating system combines multiple platforms into one: point of sale, customer relationship management (CRM), advanced reports, labor management, and kitchen supply management, which founder and CEO Shu Chowdhury says bucks the industry trend and makes it easier to manage the entire restaurant experience with real-time info that drives decision making.
“Normally you have one company that builds point-of-sale, you have another company that builds labor and scheduling, you have another company that builds inventory, you have another company that may build loyalty and CRM software, and then the operator typically has to put those four or five systems together,” he says. “What we’ve done here at SALIDO is we’ve built all those pieces ourselves in one single platform.”
Restaurateur Phil Suarez, CEO of Suarez Restaurant Group and owner of Le Dock restaurant, led the $2 million fundraising round, and says in a statement that he hopes to install the technology in more of his restaurants.
Chowdhury says the company doesn’t plan to scale too fast, and he wants to make sure SALIDO’s clients are pleased with the software’s implementation.
Those clients include several full-service restaurants and multi-unit quick-serve concepts, including Num Pang, ‘wichcraft and by CHLOE, across locations in New York City, The Hamptons, and Los Angeles.
“We’re a fast growing company, but our goal right now is not to just scale into as many units as we can, it’s really to work with the partners we’ve already identified to make sure that their operations are truly benefiting from our software,” Chowdhury says. “Instead of focusing on building a sales machine and trying to distribute to everybody, we’re spending the majority of our money on engineering and product research to make our product as good as it can be.”
To date, SALIDO has processed more than $27 million in transactions and more than 1 million total guests; it is now in pilot implementation stages with about 15 more operators.
"SALIDO has filled the void restaurants have always needed,” says Grant Reynolds, a partner in New York-based restaurant Pasquale Jones, in an email. “It’s a smart, efficient, hospitality driven system. It rocks.”
Chowdhury, who previously worked as an engineer in several industries including aerospace, says the inspiration for SALIDO came from friends in the restaurant industry who told him they believed the current systems weren’t effective.
“I looked at all that data that was being collected, but wasn’t able to be accessed or exposed,” he says. “That’s when I knew there was a massive opportunity to help the industry uncover that data and make it more visible so they could use it to drive better decision making and ultimately improve the customer experience.”
