Ghost Kitchens and Delivery Services: February Restaurant Industry Funding

In February, investors put hundreds of millions of dollars behind restaurant technology companies worldwide — although no one walked away with more cash than DoorDash.

The third-party delivery service closed a $400 million investment led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Temasek Holdings Pte, which catapulted the company to a $7.1 billion valuation.

Across the globe, Tiger Global Management, the same firm that led Olo's latest funding round last month, led a new round of funding for Panda Selected, a strong competitor in the ghost kitchen market in China. On a much smaller scale, a new kind of ghost kitchen solution based in Chicago scored an extra $1.3 million in new funding to fuel its expansion into more U.S. markets.

Note: This is the latest installment of Skift Table’s monthly restaurant funding roundup. To view past lists, click here.

Presto

Amount Raised: $30 million

Lead Investors: Recruit Holdings and Romulus Capital

Skift Table Take: Presto, long known as the company behind those tabletop tablets that diners can play with at Applebee's and similar chains, is ready to expand its brand. The company just rolled out Presto Wearables and A.I. capabilities last month, which are intended to streamline labor operations to help make front-of-house staff more efficient and more accurately predict staff scheduling forecasts. Now, it's secured the necessary funding to grow those new launches, as well as continue to improve on the tabletop technology that is the core of its business.

DoorDash

Amount Raised: $400 million

Lead Investors: Dragoneer Investment Group and Temasek Holdings Pte

Skift Table Take: For those who are keeping track, DoorDash has now raised over a billion dollars in funding in less than a year. The delivery service announced a $535 million round led by Softbank last March, followed by a $250 million round in August co-led by Coatue Management and DST Global. The latest round of funding puts the company's valuation at $7.1 billion.

Panda Selected

Amount Raised: $50 million

Lead Investors: Tiger Global Management

Skift Table Take: Chinese ghost kitchen startup Panda Selected launched in 2016 and is already attracting huge attention in its home market. The company currently owns 100 kitchen spaces in China and has plans to double that over the next eight months, according to Bloomberg. The company isn't yet profitable but plans to break even sometime in 2019.

2ndKitchen

Amount Raised: $1.35 million

Lead Investors: Hyde Park Venture Partners

Skift Table Take: 2ndKitchen markets its technology to businesses that want to carry local food without actually building out their own kitchen. The Chicago-based company developed an app where breweries, hotels, and other kitchen-less businesses that want to offer food can put together a menu sourced from popular restaurants in the area and serve that food in their own establishments. It's still a small operation for now, but its looking to expand across the midwest in the coming months to reach to a wider breadth of businesses interested in curating menus from local restaurants.

COFE App

Amount Raised: $3.2 million

Lead Investors: KISP Ventures

Skift Table Take: Kuwait-based COFE app is a third-party marketplace specifically for coffee enthusiasts. Founder and CEO Ali Al Ebrahim launched the technology in February 2018, and managed to land the new funding round within the app's first year of existence. "We are a group of coffee enthusiasts who — in the age of Tesla, Uber, and Airbnb — got frustrated with old-world ways of ordering coffee," Ebrahim said in a statement. "So we set out to streamline the coffee ordering process and bring to our mobiles phones and everyone else's as well, aiming to bring the coffee culture and technology together in one unified platform." If COFE can solve the current issues with off-premise coffee sales, Starbucks will be watching closely.

HostMe

Amount Raised: $1.3 million

Lead Investors: Schaffer Family Trust

Skift Table Take: A small player in the restaurant reservations landscape, HostMe is attempting to differentiate itself at least partially through a focus on easing the frustration of waiting for tables for both the diner and the restaurant operator. The company, based in Washington, D.C., is looking at using the latest round of funding to boost international expansion and beef up its sales and marketing team, according to the Washington Business Journal. HostMe currently counts more than 4,000 restaurant clients and generated $1 million in revenue last year.