ChowNow snaps up YC-backed POS platform Cuboh and is laying off 20% of staff
ChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.
This marks ChowNow’s first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants tackle orders across multiple services.
However, as part of the acquisition, ChowNow laid off around 30 employees, bringing the total workforce to 300. Meanwhile, Cuboh’s entire 30-person team — including marketing, sales, product and engineering — is transitioning to ChowNow.
“We unfortunately did do a little bit of a layoff as part of the restructuring to best position us,” ChowNow co-founder and CEO Chris Webb told TechCrunch. This comes after the company laid off 100 people in 2022.
The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Launched in 2012, ChowNow connects customers with local restaurants and helps businesses establish an online presence by providing custom online ordering systems and marketing support. It also offers a dispatch system that pairs restaurants with delivery drivers.
It doesn’t charge any commission fees like its competitors, and it allows restaurants to keep 100% of their profits. ChowNow considers over 20,000 small restaurants as customers and has helped process more than 250 million online orders. The company says it’s saved restaurants $700 million in commission fees.
ChowNow is a profitable company and has raised around $80 million to date, Webb said.
Cuboh is a notable addition to the company. Previously, ChowNow’s dashboard could only manage a restaurant’s in-house menu. Now restaurants no longer have to manually manage all their menus, mitigating the potential for errors and overall mayhem in the kitchen. Menus can be updated across all delivery apps to reflect out-of-stock items and price increases, among other changes.
Starting next week, restaurant owners can access a newly launched bundle, “ChowNow + Cuboh,” for $275 per month. The bundle combines ChowNow Pro ($199), the company’s flagship product that handles all ordering, marketing and operations, and Cuboh’s POS solution, which ranges from $100 to $200 a month.
And while ChowNow’s platform already integrates into over 30 POS systems, Cuboh is delivering 14 additional integrations to the table, such as Clover, Lightspeed, Brink, Micros, Revel, POSitouch, Square, Par, Dinerware, Aloha and more.
In the future, ChowNow wants to build more integrations, such as one for catering services.
“It’s getting back to the longer-term product vision of what we’re building, of being the only platform restaurants need for their entire takeout business,” Webb said.
