Just one week after Virtual Dining Concepts announced its first foray into the restaurant software sphere with the launch of Linked Eats, Linked Eats has made its first acquisition. The new software arm of VDC has acquired Sauce Technologies: an AI-powered digital ordering solution that had just raised more than $3.6 million in its latest investment round.
Sauce Technologies is financially backed by founders of Sweetgreen, SBE, Uber, and Airbnb; and the company mainly uses data-backed insights to offer pricing strategies. Linked Eats will work with Sauce Technologies to add new digital marketing and demand forecasting features to its software capabilities, and Sauce Technologies will be made available to Virtual Dining Concepts’ 4,000 digital restaurants across 30+ virtual brands.
"We are thrilled to welcome the entire Sauce team to Linked Eats," Robbie Earl, chairman of Linked Eats, said in a statement. "With third-party delivery reaching critical scale, we are seeing the landscape shift to a more profit-driven marketplace, and restaurants need new tools to thrive in this challenging and competitive environment. This acquisition will add further AI-expertise to our team and features and further our leadership in developing and providing these tools.”
Sauce’s core product offering can adjust operator prices item-by-item, based on demand and dining occasions, as well as throttle online orders by adding premium pricing during busy times in a restaurant.
Sauce Technologies’ delivery-centric dynamic pricing and revenue management tools fit in with Linked Eats’ substantial launch portfolio of digital features, which includes another dynamic pricing tool for real-time price monitoring, an AI-driven marketing tool, SEO optimization, automated uptime, and communications for operator performance.
“We at Sauce are excited to join the Linked Eats team and scale the digital growth tools that we’ve built for restaurants,” Colin Webb, Sauce Technologies’ CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “Combining Linked Eats’ operator-first approach and current platform with Sauce’s marketing automation software creates a powerful synergy to supercharge what it means to be successful for today and tomorrow’s restaurateurs.”
Contact Joanna at [email protected]m
Contact Joanna at [email protected]m
