A dash of pivots, a sprinkle of co-investing rivals and heavy seasoning of food and beverage players... UrbanPiper has played the right tune so far. But can the restaurant management platform now scale up its game?
Left to Right- Anirban Majumdar (COO), Manav Gupta (Chief of Growth) and Saurabh Gupta (CEO)
Image: Nishant Ratnakar for Forbes India
It was ‘shock and awe’. Or let’s call it the first thumb rule of the food business which Saurabh Gupta gulped last year. It was peak summer in 2021. After completing his masters in electrical engineering from the University of South California and working in the US for close to a decade, Gupta co-founded UrbanPiper with Anirban Majumdar and Manav Gupta in 2015. UrbanPiper started as a viral, social and loyal tool for restaurateurs to understand customer behaviour, improve retention and expand sales. By 2021, it morphed into a full-stack restaurant management software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, counted Kumar Vembu founder and CEO of GoFrugal, Axilor Ventures, Sequoia India and Tiger Global among its backers, and was getting ready to add new players to its cap table.
After months of prepping, Gupta was set to close the deal with a global biggie in 2021. A few days before signing, though, came the ‘shock’. The German online takeaway food company wanted to become a strategic partner. In short, it meant investing in UrbanPiper with the intent to acquire the company at a later stage. Gupta and existing investors were not prepared. “We still had a lot of juice left,” recalls Gupta. He declined to take the money, and UrbanPiper’s funding sprint came to a screeching halt before the finish line. Here was the first lesson: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
Full of beans, Gupta quickly cooked another plan. This time destiny played its bit in adding a dash of luck. Zomato’s blockbuster IPO in July last year gave Gupta some food for thought. He knew maverick food entrepreneur Deepinder Goyal and called to congratulate him. After exchanging pleasantries, Gupta got into the act. “We are raising our next round. Would you like to invest?” he asked, taking his chances. To his surprise, Goyal was game. Egged on, Gupta now added another ingredient to the conversation. “Would you mind if I also get Swiggy on board?” he grinned.
Goyal again didn’t disappoint. He knew Gupta’s dilemma. UrbanPiper was a neutral platform and not having both the food aggregators on the cap table would hurt the prospects of the startup which had speeded up integrating restaurants into Zomato and Swiggy. Goyal, though, remained sceptical about the ambitious plan. “Go ahead, but I don’t know how you would execute it,” he said. The explicit consent from Swiggy’s rival whetted Gupta’s appetite. “I knew Sriharsha Majety, and I was sure I would bring the two rivals together,” he reasoned.