Serving Up the Future — CRV’s Series A Investment in Bbot
Tags: Vc Funding, Restaurant Industry, Hospitality Industry, VC, Series A

Serving Up the Future — CRV’s Series A Investment in Bbot CRV Follow Jul 22 · 4 min read

By Reid Christian

When CRV invested in DoorDash back in 2013, just a few short weeks after the young company’s initial launch, we nabbed a front row seat to the initial digital transactions for the restaurant industry. Clearly COVID has accelerated the current wave of food delivery. Meanwhile, modern point-of-sale (POS) systems, like Toast and Lightspeed, and many property management systems (PMS) have open APIs which permit them to accept orders and transactions from other platforms fueling growth in the space even further. Apparel and many other industries are racing to transact digitally, but there’s one sector that has struggled to get with the times. Outside of food delivery, hospitality has been a laggard in the rapid move from physical transactions to e-commerce.

As customers, we want the effortless ability to start a drink tab here in the sun and then sit down and order food over there in the shade when it gets too hot. We want to be able to order from our room, so we can accept delivery down at the pool, but all of these transactions deal with identity, payments, accounting, logistics, menus and more. This is also what makes e-commerce for restaurants, bars and hotels so nuanced and difficult to pull off, but consumers are demanding it. I think this Tweet from @tobi perfectly sums up the flexibility people are searching for.

I first met Steve Simoni, the co-founder and CEO of Bbot, a year ago in the throes of the pandemic. Steve started the company in 2017, with his fellow co-founders, Luke Allen and Greg Jaworski. (Side Note: It’s not uncommon for venture capitalists to talk about strong founding teams with a history of working together, but these three take that phrase to a whole different level. This trio of talented entrepreneurs served in the Navy together before founding Bbot.) Bbot is a hospitality tech company that serves thousands of bars, restaurants, hotels, breweries, food halls and ghost kitchens with reliable order and payment software. Last month we finally got the chance to meet in person. We caught up at one of Steve’s customers’ spots, a place called The Greens over on Pier 17 in New York City. The Greens was a concert venue that had to pivot due to COVID. With Bbot’s help, The Greens easily shifted to a new business model during the pandemic, providing rentable “lawn” greens with stunning views up and down the Hudson River. This is the kind of flexibility that Bbot affords hospitality operators, the ability for a small business owner to shift gears and go from hawking concert tickets to renting out rooftop moments.

What is Bbot? It’s an order and pay application programming interface (API) that enables anyone in the hospitality industry to accept digital transactions for food and beverages. Bbot is used by restaurant owners, hotel managers, property management companies and third party software developers building solutions for these end markets. The Bbot platform includes everything from order and pay (think Shopify checkout + digital menu management) to an API to integrate with POS, PMS and logistics providers (delivery) as well as user interface (UI) components if you are a third party developer so you can build Bbot directly into your app or site. Bbot also reconciles transaction data across your POS and provides digital orders for location and brand level reporting (accounting features) and provides identity management (start a tab from anywhere, add to it and then close it anywhere).

Today we’re thrilled to announce that CRV is leading Bbot’s $15 million in Series A funding. I’m also excited to join this exciting company’s board because there’s so much need across the hospitality industry for a solution like Bbot. This latest investment will enable Steve, Luke, Greg and the team to expand their team, continue building out their platform and for the company to meet the massive demand it’s seeing from across the developer community from people who want to craft their own extensions and applications across the Bbot ecosystem. We’re looking forward to celebrating many more milestones in the future with this team and to seeing more and more businesses being able to give guests the experiences they want.

Here at CRV we’re always looking for founders who are focused on removing frustrations for businesses and their customers alike. If you and your crew are focused on overhauling an industry pain point, get to know our team and drop us a note.