SOUTH AFRICA – UberEats, the American online food ordering and delivery platform has announced that it has acquired the South African restaurant technology start up orderTalk at an undisclosed sum.
orderTalk Inc. owned by venture capital firm Knife Capital, offers online ordering software and call center solutions for the restaurant, takeout, and hospitality industry.
According to an article by Business Report, the sale marks a major step for UberEats giving it ability to streamline workflows by directly integrating with leading point of sale (POS) systems.
UberEats business reported it was having challenges integrating the POS system on a large scale thus the orderTalk acquisition would help in increasing efficiency, streamline workflow and reduce on errors arising with manual labour.
“With orderTalk’s engineering talent and the group of people that we’re acquiring, we’ll be able to supercharge our own point of sale integration strategy”, said Uber Eats head of business development, Liz Meyerdirk.
For Knife Capital, the acquisition by UberEats guarantees an opportunity to secure significant returns.
“An exit is part of the standard business model for any VC.
We invest with the intention to secure significant returns for our entrepreneurs and investors and trade sales are the most common way to generate such returns.
The time was right and so was the offer by Uber. It therefore made sense to exit”, said a statement from Knife Capital.
The start-up founded by Hilton Keats in 1998, provides online ordering systems for restaurants worldwide by utilizing proprietary remote ordering software including mobile and social media applications.
It started operations in South Africa in 2005, then received US$720,069.12 in investment in 2008 from Knife Capital which is owned by internet billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth to scale the business internationally, says Business Report.
It also raised capital by way of investment from HBD, providing it with enormous value, said CEO of orderTalk, Patrick Eldon.
