Popmenu

Popmenu is a restaurant technology company that provides an all-in-one SaaS platform combining digital marketing, online ordering and on-premise tools. Its core product turns a restaurant's menu into a dynamic, interactive web experience: photos, reviews, ratings and social validation are placed directly on the restaurant's own website, guests can interact with and share individual dishes, and diners can become "followers" of a restaurant to receive personalized offers and recommendations. Restaurants also get real-time menu management, automated omnichannel communication tools and analytics that measure performance down to the dish level.

Beyond menus and websites, the platform supports delivery and pickup coordination, customer reviews, follow-up digital marketing promotions, social media management and email. During the COVID-19 pandemic the company added contactless ordering, allowing guests to scan a QR code to view and order from a menu on their phone. The product suite is described as incorporating artificial intelligence, automation and data on guest preferences, and the company has developed an upmarket bundle called Popmenu Max with AI-powered features.

The positioning is explicitly a counterweight to third-party platforms: Popmenu markets itself as a way for restaurants to keep the guest journey — discovery, ordering and payment — on their own digital property rather than ceding customer relationships, ordering data and branding to Yelp, Tripadvisor, Google and delivery marketplaces.

Founding story

Popmenu was founded in 2016 in Atlanta by Brendan Sweeney with three former colleagues — Mike Gullo, Anthony (Tony) Roy and Justis Blasco — who had worked together at CareerBuilder and/or Commissions Inc. Sweeney, who had built restaurant websites as a web developer roughly two decades earlier, said he had no background in the restaurant business but was struck that restaurants presented their inventory as plain text while other businesses used rich media. Sweeney, Gullo and Blasco had helped scale Commissions Inc, a SaaS provider that helped local real estate agents compete against platforms such as Zillow until its acquisition by Fidelity National Financial in 2016; the founders applied the same playbook of helping local businesses reclaim ground from dominant third-party platforms to restaurants.

Business model

Business-to-business software-as-a-service sold to restaurant operators on a subscription basis, supplemented by commission-free online ordering that restaurants run under their own brand.

Recurring subscription fees charged per restaurant location; in 2020 the software was sold for a monthly fee starting at $269 per location. Online ordering is positioned as commission-free for the restaurant.

Traction

The company said it was bootstrapped for roughly its first 18 months and had raised $6 million by November 2019. It reported serving thousands of restaurants in the US and beyond in 2019, and cited 10 years of industry trends compressing into the first 10 weeks of COVID-19 as an accelerant to growth. As of July 2023 it reported more than 10,000 customers, 9.8 million followers created, $125 million in commission-free online ordering revenue generated, 1.5 million menu items, and a 4.7/5 average client satisfaction score over the prior 90 days.

Latest developments

The most recent developments in the sources are from 2023: a July 2023 traction snapshot of 10,000+ customers, $125 million in commission-free online ordering revenue generated and 1.5 million menu items; a February 2023 Pymnts interview with the company's CFO on hospitality technology; and a January 2023 report that Popmenu was again named a Glassdoor Employees' Choice Best Places to Work winner.