Flight Plan #008 — May I See The Menu? Mr Yum $11m Post-Seed Investment Notes
Mr Yum has a lot of the ingredients that create excitement for us for a company at this stage — ambitious and capable founding team, exceptional growth and product-market fit, expansion opportunities across geography and new target verticals, replicable growth & sales playbook, exciting product roadmap, and proven execution at pace.
We’re very excited to lead an $11m post-Seed funding round into Mr Yum to fuel their growth and the adoption of QR code ordering technology across the hospitality industry.
Mr Yum is setting out to change the world’s ordering experience with their web-based mobile menu, payments, and marketing platform for the US$630bn food and beverage, restaurant & entertainment industry. Their product has evolved into a robust platform that provides hospitality venues with beautiful menus for QR-code contactless ordering and payment, loyalty, ordering for pickup and delivery, and are servicing customers in Australia, UK, US, New Zealand & South Africa.
Leading this investment represents the largest deal completed by TEN13’s venture syndicate to date and partner, Stew Glynn, said “we’re so excited to support the team at Mr Yum, they continue to deliver on a product that has become hugely valuable for the reviving hospitality industry, their customers love them and the spectacular growth curve shows how much value they deliver. What’s even more exciting is the special culture they are building across the company with a real love for the industry and their customers, bold plans, fast execution, amazingly high-quality people joining the company — they have all the ingredients of what you hope will become one of Australia’s next breakout companies”
The Problem
Restaurants and venues were struggling pre-COVID; many are still haemorrhaging:
- Margins: Hospitality margins are notoriously tight, with the average venue having a net profit margin of less than 3%. Venues have been squeezed for years with a rising cost base and very few levers to boost revenues and reduce operating cost. The industry has been slow to adopt technology or innovative solutions to combat this.
- Data leakage: Venues have leveraged aggregators and pickup/delivery services like UberEats, DoorDash and Deliveroo who own the customer experience and user data. These platforms drive volume and have been seen as a necessary evil as they provide access to customers for venues at the expense of gross margins.
- Changing customer expectations: Consumer and regulatory expectations are changing with COVID-19 and many expecting mobile-first (contactless) ordering. Additionally, customers are looking for visual menus so they can see what their food looks like before they order. In an industry dominated by social platforms like Instagram, the visual aesthetics of food when ordering is very important.
And for customers — the ordering experience when you’re out and about at your favourite restaurant or pub hasn’t evolved for years being service-based (can’t get the attention of the waiter), paper menus (wonder what this dish looks like?), or queuing up to order at the till.
Powerful product with unique offerings
Mr Yum is a web-based mobile menu, payments and marketing platform for the hospitality and entertainment industries. Mr Yum integrates with all of the major POS providers (in Aus) which serve as a distribution channel for the company.
Mr Yum provides its customers with:
- Beautiful visual menus
- In-venue QR ordering and payment
- Delivery/pickup ordering
- Loyalty offering
Through these offerings, Mr Yum helps customers:
- Generate 20–40% in increased spend per customer (average order value) through enticing photos, more efficient ordering (no queueing or getting waiters attention), up-selling and cross-selling of deals; and
- Save 5–15% in labour costs by reducing headcount needed to manually take orders and payments thus become more efficient and profitable.
Not just for Hospitality
Mr Yum is not confined to your typical restaurant, cafe, or pub as target customers.
They widened their net of adjacent target verticals by recently winning the tender for Sydney Airport and agreeing to launch one of Australia’s prominent sports stadium groups. Mr Yum is expanding their addressable market with moves into stadiums, outdoor events (music festivals), airports, casinos, hotels, cruise lines, universities, and more with their core QR-code ordering product. They’ve landed some of the most exciting venues across many verticals such Australia Venue Co, Live Nation, The Grounds of Alexandria, Sahara casino (Vegas strip), O’Brien Group, Strike Bowling and more.
A Supremely Talented Team
Hiring top-tier talent is a challenge for all scale-up businesses. Mr Yum has proven to be building out an amazing culture under the guidance of Kim, Adrian, Kerry and Andrei and the management team. Their team grew from 10 to 65+ over the last year and will likely 2–3x again this year with their plans. This is an amazing place to work, and if you want to join one of Australia’s next break-out companies — Mr Yum is hiring now of course! Across their Melbourne HQ and their new offices in the US & UK.
Aligned investors
Mr Yum represents one of the fastest-growing companies in our TEN13 portfolio and we are excited to be joined by such a stellar cast of co-investors in this round with Airtree, NBA star Patty Mills, electronic dance artists Rüfüs Du Sol, cofounders of Linktree, and Shark Tank’s Andrew Banks.
We’re very excited to support the founding team and provide more fuel to this rocketship.
