Saurabh Gupta is the Co-founder and CEO of UrbanPiper, the leading SaaS platform in the restaurant industry. UrbanPiper helps the smallest of restaurants and the largest of chains across the world, to grow their in-store and online commerce.
Over the past 6 years, UrbanPiper has disrupted the food and beverages industry with its technology driven products that solve the most pressing challenges of restaurant owners. In 2022, it became the first start-up to have been funded by both rival food aggregator platforms – Zomato and Swiggy.
Going forward, Saurabh aims to establish UrbanPiper as a one-stop platform that helps restaurants around the world run their operations efficiently.
1. How is UrbanPiper helping the HORECA industry with its technology stack?
UrbanPiper is a full-stack restaurant management platform that assists F&B merchants run and scale their businesses with minimum hassle. Since our inception in 2016, we have revolutionized the food-tech space with multiple ultra-modern solutions tailored to the needs of restaurateurs. Over time, we have become the preferred choice for 27,000+ restaurants worldwide. Our products are trusted by brands across India, UAE, UK, and beyond.
Our USP is a robust tech-stack consisting of three offerings that is far ahead of traditional players in the space:
Hub
Hub integrates online orders from food apps such as Zomato and Swiggy into existing POS systems of restaurants. Hub has been built to offer present-day features such as menu management, order tracking, inventory management, detailed reporting & analytics, payment reconciliation, and more to simplify and streamline restaurant operations.
Prime POS
Prime POS is an end-to-end, cloud-based restaurant POS software that offers KOT and billing, inventory management, online order management, delivery integrations, detailed reporting, advanced analytics, and more.
Unlike traditional POS systems, Prime POS has been designed for the restaurants of today. With the latest integrations to facilitate online orders, a 99.95% uptime, and regular feature updates, Prime POS is resilient, reliable, and future-proof.
Meraki
Meraki is UrbanPiper’s comprehensive plug-and-play website building tool that allows restaurants to build an additional stream for orders. Our websites and apps are used by key market players such as Subway, Meatigo, Bikanervala, and more. It has been built to offer key features such as a customer directory, advanced analytics, menu management, payment integrations, marketing automation, loyalty programs, and more.
We were one of the first players in the restaurant industry to truly embrace SaaS (Software as a service.) We meticulously built our products to leverage the latest technology to create meaningful outcomes for restaurant owners. From the very beginning, our goal has been to allow restaurants to operate seamlessly. Even today, we work tirelessly to innovate and deploy the latest technology to help restaurants grow their top line while minimizing their bottom line.
2. How are new age technologies disrupting the Horeca Industry?
The biggest impact of technology has been increased awareness among restaurant owners. The adoption of technology is making restaurant owners more educated and aware. They have come to understand that managing an entire business can be made much easier and efficient using technology.
With technology, they can answer difficult but crucial questions such as, ‘is my top-line growing?’ ‘Am I controlling the bottom-line?’ ‘What are some areas that present an opportunity for growth?’ Apart from big picture questions, understanding day-to-day analytics can be made extremely simple. All in all, technology can help restaurant owners run their businesses very wisely.
More importantly, customer habits have changed over time. Customers have now become tech-savvy. In order to stay relevant to the end customer, restaurants must ensure that tech has been seamlessly integrated into their operations to provide a stellar experience that keeps customers coming back.
3. The Indian online food delivery space has evolved a lot in recent years, how has the business been affected and what have been some trends that you have witnessed over the years?
We’re living in a time when innovation is at its peak and technology is spearheading this movement. The way people consume food is going through a massive transformation and the trends that we see today are going to become habits that stay. The reliance on online delivery has grown rapidly over the past few years. That, in turn, has propelled restaurants to adopt technology to be able to cater to the demands of modern-day customers. Restaurant technology has become wide-spread in a short span of time and it is only expected to grow upwards from here.
While we’re already seeing new-age ideas such as kitchen robotics, menu engineering & design, and more being adopted by restaurants, these trends have affected restaurant businesses differently. Players who adopted technology were able to cut down costs, expand speedily, and offer compelling experiences to their customers. This superiority in restaurant management reflected in the form of higher sales and increased margins. Contrast that with restaurants that stuck to the traditional management practices that rely heavily on staff and lack technology. Many of these restaurants fell in the face of competition from players who had managed their operations much more strategically. According to estimates, about 40% of restaurants were forced out of business during the pandemic.
As some businesses struggled to minimize rising costs out of the virus-induced gloom, others saw a chance to embrace technology. With online orders rising during lockdown, it was the ideal opportunity for restaurants to transition from physical to digital. Restaurants that made the leap then are reaping the benefits of technology until today and will continue to in the years to come. Whiel those that have been left behind have a long distance to cover. In the past few years, the HORECA industry has certainly witnessed a ‘tech-tonic’ shift, one that will affect how restaurants run businesses for years to come.
4. What milestones have you achieved currently and what are your expansion plans going forward?
Over the past six years, our restaurant management platform has benefitted over 27,000 restaurants across eight countries. We have garnered the trust of restaurant market leaders such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway, Curefoods, Taco Bell, and Rebel Foods.
As of 2022, we process about 15 million orders per month including 20% of all online orders from Swiggy and Zomato with an annual order value of around $750 million.
Going forward, we aim to become a single-window platform for restaurants to help them operate and scale their business. We plan to expand our presence in the Middle East and Europe in a bid to simplify the operations of about 200,000 restaurants.
We have witnessed over 10X growth over the past two years. Going forward, we are targeting 7-10x year-on-year growth. We have been expanding our team rapidly and have managed to bring in some of the top talent in the industry to help us achieve these targets. While retaining focus on India, our objective is to deepen UrbanPiper’s presence in a number of countries around the world. As long as we stick to our DNA of building reliable products that help restaurant owners, we believe we are on the right track to achieve our goals.
5. What has been the biggest advantage of being a startup that is backed by both industry giants swiggy and zomato?
When we were looking at our Series B funding, we were very clear about wanting both Swiggy and Zomato on the board. As a restaurant management platform, we strive to be seen as a reliable and impartial source of technology for the industry and having both food aggregators on board was critical to achieve that vision.
The biggest advantage of being the only startup to be funded by both Swiggy and Zomato is the unmatched credibility that we garnered in the industry. At the core, our mission is to help restaurants simplify their operations to grow their businesses efficiently and seamlessly. We are utilizing the funding from Swiggy, Zomato, and our other investors to expand our product and engineering teams, strengthen our platform capabilities, and broaden our offerings for restaurants to achieve this mission and help millions of restaurant partners across the globe.
