Earlier this month Allset, a mobile app helping restaurants cut dining time in half by allowing customers to pre-order their meals, has secured a $5 million to further expand on the US market.
Greycroft Partners led this round, with participation from new investor Vaizra Investments. Previous investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Compound, FJ Labs, and Ukraine’s SMRK VC, also joined.
Users search for restaurants either on the Allset app — available on iOS and Android — or on the startup’s website. They then pick a place, choose from the menu, order, and pay ahead of time, so that everything is ready and taken care of once they sit down upon arrival.
The service is free for diners. Allset charges each restaurant a 12 percent commission on each order placed through its platform. The startup claims to have more than 700 restaurants listed in nine U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, where the startup is based.
According to cofounder and CEO Stas Matviyenko, Allset will use the new money to expand to all major U.S. cities by the end of 2018. Upcoming launches include Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, and San Diego.
“We don’t have plans to expand to other industries, like delivery or takeout,” he wrote, in an email to VentureBeat. That’s probably wise, as the food delivery space is already well-garnished with startups like Instacart, Caviar, and Grubhub.
Chatbot attempts
The Allset team had briefly explored the chatbot avenue and had announced the availability of its service through a Facebook Messenger chatbot. At the time, the startup was also looking into a Slack integration, but the bot hype quickly faded.
“After the popularity of bots dropped, we decided to focus on the app and our web version only,” wrote Matviyenko. “Today, Allset is only available through the mobile app and our website.”
The chief executive claims the startup has more than 150,000 users and over 200 corporate accounts. Over twenty-five percent of all Allset orders are paid for by companies, according to a statement.
Allset was founded in 2015 by Matviyenko and Anna Polishchuk, another Ukrainian entrepreneur, as a continuation of their previous project Settle.
In September last year the startup secured a $2.35 million seed round. It currently has 32 employees across its offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Kyiv (Kiev).
