ChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, has acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps in one place.
This marks ChowNow's first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants address orders across multiple services.
However, as part of the acquisition, ChowNow laid off about 30 employees, bringing its total workforce to 300. Meanwhile, Cuboh's entire 30-person team, including marketing, sales, product and engineering, is transitioning. to ChowNow.
“Unfortunately, we did a small layoff as part of the restructuring to better position ourselves,” ChowNow co-founder and CEO Chris Webb told TechCrunch. This comes after the company laid off 100 people in 2022.
The finanacial terms of the contract were not disclosed.
Launched in 2012, ChowNow connects customers with local restaurants and helps businesses establish an online presence by providing customized online ordering systems and marketing support. It also offers a delivery system that links restaurants with delivery drivers.
It does not charge commissions like its competitors and allows restaurants to keep 100% of their profits. ChowNow serves more than 20,000 small restaurants as customers and has helped process more than 250 million online orders. The company says it has saved restaurants $700 million in commissions.
ChowNow is a profitable company and has raised about $80 million to date, Webb said.
Cuboh is a notable addition to the company. Previously, the ChowNow dashboard could only manage a restaurant's internal menu. Now restaurants no longer have to manually manage all of their menus, mitigating the possibility of errors and general chaos in the kitchen. Menus can be updated on all delivery apps to reflect out-of-stock items and price increases, among other changes.
Starting next week, restaurant owners will be able to access a newly launched package, “ChowNow + Cuboh,” for $275 per month. The bundle combines ChowNow Pro ($199), the company's flagship product that handles all ordering, marketing and operations, and Cuboh's POS solution, which ranges from $100 to $200 per month.
And while ChowNow's platform already integrates with over 30 POS systems, including Toast, Otter, MobileBytes, Positouch and more, Cuboh brings 14 additional integrations to the table, including Clover, Lightspeed, Brink, Micros, Revel, Positouch, Square , Pair. , Dinnerware, Aloha and more.
In the future, ChowNow wants to create more integrations, such as one for catering services.
“It's about getting back to the long-term product vision that we're building, of being the one platform that restaurants need for their entire takeout business,” Webb said.
