TechCrunch May 20, 2014
Mobile wait listing service for restaurants NoWait has raised $10 million in Series B funding, the company is announcing this morning. The new round was led by Drive Capital, the $250 million Ohio-based fund focused on Midwestern companies, and co-founded by former Sequoia partners, Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen. Existing investors also participated in the funding, which NoWait says will be put towards expanding its presence in restaurants and with consumers, plus further product development.
The company today offers a consumer-facing application that shows you a list of nearby restaurants, wait times and distances and lets you join wait lists from your phone. And for its restaurant partners, NoWait provides a wait list and table-management application, which lets restaurants alert their patrons to available seats via text message, as a replacement for restaurant buzzer systems.
In addition to texting diners that their tables are ready, NoWait also lets the restaurants send brief marketing messages along with that text to promote specials or appetizers, for example. And more recently, the company has been working to introduce push notifications in the consumer app so diners could search, add their names to the wait list and then be notified in one, more seamless, experience.
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