A dash of pivots, a sprinkle of co-investing rivals and heavy seasoning of food and beverage players... UrbanPiper has played the right tune so far. But can the restaurant management platform now scale up its game?
It was ‘shock and awe’. Or let’s call it the first thumb rule of the food business which Saurabh Gupta gulped last year. It was peak summer in 2021. After completing his masters in electrical engineering from the University of South California and working in the US for close to a decade, Gupta co-founded UrbanPiper with Anirban Majumdar and Manav Gupta in 2015. UrbanPiper started as a viral, social and loyal tool for restaurateurs to understand customer behaviour, improve retention and expand sales. By 2021, it morphed into a full-stack restaurant management software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, counted Kumar Vembu founder and CEO of GoFrugal, Axilor Ventures, Sequoia India and Tiger Global among its backers, and was getting ready to add new players to its cap table.
After months of prepping, Gupta was set to close the deal with a global biggie in 2021. A few days before signing, though, came the ‘shock’. The German online takeaway food company wanted to become a strategic partner. In short, it meant investing in UrbanPiper with the intent to acquire the company at a later stage. Gupta and existing investors were not prepared. “We still had a lot of juice left,” recalls Gupta. He declined to take the money, and UrbanPiper’s funding sprint came to a screeching halt before the finish line. Here was the first lesson: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.