Saudi’s Taker raises six-figure seed to help restaurants create websites and apps to sell online

Taker, a Saudi SaaS startup has raised six-figure (USD) funding in a round led by 500 Startups and Saudi Venture Capital Company with the participation of angel investors, it announced today in a statement to MENAbytes without disclosing the exact size of the deal.

Founded in January 2019 by Abdullah Alsaadi, Taker enables restaurants of different sizes to set up their online presence by creating a website and app using its online software.  The platform comes with features like branch management, menu management, delivery zones, order types, promo codes and loyalty programs, and one-time password (for customers to sign up and login).

To put this in simple words, they’ve built a Shopify for restaurants that allows them to sell to their customers directly without depending on the food delivery platforms. The startup charges restaurants a monthly subscription fee (instead of taking a cut on every order – which is what food delivery platforms do) starting from $269 month going up to $549 per month. For every additional branch, the restaurants are required to pay an extra fee between $59 to $99.

Taker also offers different add-ons including meal subscription management which is priced at $799 per month.

In addition to add-ons, all the Taker plans come with integration with the restaurant POS systems and payment gateways, making it easy for restaurants to start taking online orders.

Abdullah Alsaadi, the founder and CEO of Taker, commenting on the investment, said, “At Taker, our mission is to make the food ordering process easy and delightful for both our clients and their customers. With the newly raised capital, our highly ambitious team looks forward to further enhance our online capabilities. With the onset of Covid-19 over the past few weeks, we have witnessed a significant surge in demand for our services and hope to see more offline restaurants take advantage of our offerings as we forge ahead to meet the growing demand by facilitating a robust online ordering management platform.”

He also explained that some of their clients had previously made attempts at app development and building customized websites without any success, “Having switched to our platform, they have witnessed greater brand visibility, and increased volume of orders on their app compared to some of the food aggregation apps thereby resulting in huge savings on commission payouts. We believe that in terms of feature-density, user experience, and quality of integrations, we are the best-in-class B2B software-as-a-service provider in the F&B sector.”

The announcement by Taker comes at a time when the food delivery platforms of the region (especially UAE) are receiving a lot of criticism from restaurant owners and other stakeholders of the F&B industry for charging high commission which in some cases go up to 35 percent.

A platform like Taker could be super useful for restaurants that have their own delivery fleet as they can then build their online presence without having to rely on food ordering and delivery platforms.

Sharif El-Badawi, Managing Partner, 500 Startups said: “Surging demand for online food ordering has resulted in many offline restaurants signing up with Taker within a short period of time. Abdullah and his team have been working very hard to achieve double-digit growth month-on-month and this has made us proud.”

“Their niche product has found an end-to-end solution that works successfully for their clients and stands as a testament of Taker’s positioning, as one of the leading platforms in the MENA region. We are excited to collaborate with Taker and look forward to a great future for the company,” he added.