Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While the restaurant industry represents nearly $800 billion in annual spending in the US, it remains highly fragmented, with 90% of restaurants supporting fewer than 50 employees and 70% of restaurants operating just one location, according to the National Restaurant Association. To help restaurant managers improve operations, startups are aiming to integrate tech into nearly every aspect of the business, from CRM to inventory to engaging visitors while they wait for a table.

Investors have poured nearly $2.5B into the restaurant tech category globally since 2012, across over 600 deals. There have also been a number of acquisitions, including Yelp’s recent acquisition of seating management tool Nowait, and Subway’s acquisition of mobile restaurant payments platform Avanti Commerce. Revel Systems, which had been one of the most well-funded companies in the space with $128.5M, was also acquired for over $580M by private equity firm Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe.

We’re also seeing new investors in the space. Food delivery startup Just Eat, for example, recently launched a food tech accelerator whose investments included several restaurant tech startups. To better visualize the emerging restaurant tech startup scene, we put together the infographic below highlighting over 100 of these startups and the parts of the restaurant they target....

VC-backed companies continue to raise more money, with the first half of 2015 seeing nearly $60B invested across more than 3,500 deals. This puts the year on track to hit nearly $120B worth of investment, growth of 35% from last year’s already record-high funding total of $88.3B.

However, deals have not followed the same growth, with 2015 on track to be the first year without deal growth since 2011. This suggests that deals are getting larger, which is evidenced by the increasing presence of $100M financings.Internet and mobile continue to account for the bulk of deals to VC-backed companies, as the two major sectors accounted for 65% of all deals in Q2’15. All other sectors remained fairly range-bound with healthcare accounting for 12%, software 5%, and consumer products & services at 3%.

As VC deals get larger, there are fewer of them. 2015 could be the first year without deal growth since 2011....

According to a report from Martin Prosperity, venture capital investment is heavily concentrated across several industral sectors. America's top five industries account for 76.3 percent of all VC investment across the nation, about $25 billion in total. 

Software receives the largest slice of the VC pie by far, accounting for 36.2 percent (almost $12 billion) while biotechnology comes second with 17.3 percent ($5.7 billion). Media and entertainment rounds off the top three with 9.5 percent ($3.2 billion)....