Restaurants are in a battle to get online customers to order from their own websites or mobile apps, rather than DoorDash or Uber Eats.
Could no-download mobile apps be the solution?
A group of investors, including Detroit Lions star Amon-Ra St. Brown and Pieology founder Carl Cheng, is betting yes.
They contributed to a $10 million funding round for Curate, a tech startup that makes what it calls “instant apps,” or mobile ordering and loyalty apps that customers do not have to download to their phones.
Curate believes that the extra step of going to the App Store and downloading a restaurant’s app is preventing a lot of customers from using them. Instead, they’re choosing a one-stop-shop like DoorDash, which carries higher costs for both the customer and the restaurant.
By lowering the barrier of entry to mobile ordering, Curate believes it can drive more direct orders to restaurants and use the data to turn those customers into repeat visitors.
The technology relies on an iPhone feature called App Clips, which are fast, lightweight versions of mobile apps that can be opened with a QR code or tap. They put customers directly into an ordering flow and give the option to sign up for a loyalty program. They also allow the restaurant to send the customer push notifications later on.
Curate says App Clips provide “the benefits of a native app (more return orders, higher conversions, push notifications) with the ease of a website.” (The company also offers traditional, downloadable mobile apps for iPhone and Android.)
It is not the only company looking to tackle the pesky app-download problem. App-less loyalty programs have been a growing trend in restaurants for a couple of years. Portillo’s new program, for instance, lives in customers’ mobile wallets, rather than an app; others simply rely on a customer’s phone number to track their rewards and spending, no download required.
Curate’s product also features ordering, which differentiates it from those other options. And the company offered several data points to demonstrate its impact. It says, for instance, that customers have seen their volume of commission-free delivery orders triple, on average, after adopting an instant app.
And at Mama Hieu’s, a chicken restaurant in California, online sales increased 44% after switching to Curate from another online ordering provider, said co-founder Jimmy Lee. “It's the first time our direct ordering channel has felt like a real habit for customers,” he said.
The technology has also won over Howard Gordon, a former longtime marketing leader at The Cheesecake Factory. He’s now Curate’s chief business development officer, and said the technology would have fundamentally changed how Cheesecake interacted with customers while he was there.
Los Angeles-based Curate has seen business pick up over the past year as more restaurants look to lure customers away from third-party delivery apps. It plans to use the funding to help it expand to more restaurant chains and continue developing its technology.
The funding round was led by Kirk Brown, the co-founder of data company ZoomInfo, with support from venture capital firm K5 Global.
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