Leapset acquires NY startup Buzz Table
Silicon Valley-based Leapset, which has a Sri Lankan development centre, recently made its fledgling acquisition with BuzzTable, a New York early stage startup that offers a waitlist type front-of-restaurant service offering. This is a part of the company’s plan to soon offer a fully-fledged restaurant operating system, according to Mani Kulasooriya, the Chief Executive Officer of Leapset.
Speaking exclusively to the Business Times, Mr. Kulasooriya also revealed that the next big step for his company was another acquisition in the outside-of-restaurant, or promotion, space. This next step is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2014, with two or three potential candidates already having been singled out for consideration. This also complements Leapset’s existing flagship product, which is a point of sale (POS) offering, for the middle-of-restaurant space, that Mr. Kulasooriya opined is the “most elegant” product available in the space to date. In fact, it also emerged that, while the company’s current focus was small and medium restaurants, it would start going after corporate accounts during 2014, primarily due to the number of inquiries that it had received to date about its POS.
Additionally, Mr. Kulasooriya also talked about the new Leapset Insights service that his company was now offering to its existing customers, which is a credit card analytics option that allowed restaurateurs to mine data from existing records, such as which customers return most often (by name), how much do they spend, what days have the most business, how rain/seasons effect business, etc. He noted that this would add a lot more value based on the data available from a restaurant’s credit card transactions already handled by Leapset. Also commenting on a recently announced merger between Sysco and US Foods, the largest and second largest US-based food services companies, respectively due to a stake in Leapset being held by Sysco, Mr. Kulasooriya stated that, should this merger be completed as expected by late 2014, his company would have access to a significantly larger number than the 400,000 restaurants that Sysco’s network currently offers Leapset.
Further, Mr. Kulasooriya also indicated that another development for his company was the revamping of its flagship POS service, taking into account new technologies like those used in tablet PCs. He also remarked that, since the US food services industry had a high, 40 per cent turnover, the Leapset POS was made easier for servers, etc.