Digital food-ordering platform Flipdish has secured €40 million in funding from one of the US’s best-known investment firms.
The company, co-founded by Conor and James McCarthy and active in 15 European companies, is looking to double-down on demand for its services in the wake of the pandemic.
Tiger Global Management has led the new financing into Flipdish, marking its second Irish investment in less than a year after it backed employee communications software company WorkVivo in a $16 million funding round in May 2020.
The New York-headquartered investment firm’s portfolio also includes Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, Peloton, LinkedIn, Uber and Stripe, the online payments company founded by Patrick and John Collison.
Founded by brothers Conor and James McCarthy in 2015, Flipdish positions itself as an alternative to online fast-food delivery aggregators such as Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats by helping restaurant owners bring their online ordering capability in-house.
The company provides software that provides direct ordering from restaurants, offering a “white label” app solution that allows restaurants to retain control over business data while still tapping into the growing market for eating at home.
Flipdish currently provides its technology to thousands of independent restaurants as well as major brands like Yamamori, Wowburger, Sprout & Co, Dunnes Stores and Eddie Rockets.
The company has seen a surge in business since the onset of the pandemic with 300 per cent growth last year and has branched out also to convenience stores to provide on-demand grocery delivery services.
“We were looking for a backer that would have the resources to keep supporting us as we grow and obviously Tiger have huge experience in helping company scale from where we are to IPO,” said Conor McCarthy, the company’s chief executive.
Flipdish, which recently announced plans to hire 300 more people, has more than 3,000 restaurants on its platform alone with over 1,000 stores. Revenues have growth tenfold since a since a €7.5 million funding round in 2018. Mr McCarthy sees lots more growth potential however.
“The money will be used to help us expand in regions where we are already operating such as France and Germany. There is still lots of growth potential in all our markets with us only having about 2 per cent share in Britain for example. Across Europe there are thousands of restaurants who need direct ordering or who will end up going out of business,” Mr McCarthy added.
Flipdish said restaurants are increasingly moving away from well-known delivery services as not only do such platforms take up to 30 per cent of the cost of an order, but they are also increasingly directly competing with them through the creation of their own rival brands.
“The investment fits our strategy of investing in high quality companies that are benefiting from powerful secular growth trends and are led by excellent management teams,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management.
