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Just Eat invests £3.5m in hospitality payment app Flypay to start strategic partnership
3 min read
10 October 2016
Flypay, which allows customers to settle bills in restaurants and bars via app, has received a £3.5m investment from Just Eat to mark what will be a “strategic partnership”.
The Just Eat funding round follows on from a £7m Series A investment that Flypay, which boasts Jamie’s Italian and Gourmet Burger Kitchen as clients, secured from Time Out in July 2015.
Self-described as “the market leader in innovative, state-of-the-art technology for the hospitality industry”, Flypay has also welcomed Just Eat as a partner on its new Flyt platform.
The Flyt service is designed to solve the complexity faced by restaurants, pubs and bars when using multiple digital tools from various providers, by bringing together bookings, loyalty, delivery and reviews et al in one place.
“Investing in Flypay will enable us to continue to build a seamless experience for consumers who will be able to order, pay, receive customer care and book delivery through the same product,” said David Buttress, CEO, Just Eat.
“The technology will help us to enhance our offer to casual dining restaurant chains, enabling them to fulfil delivery using Just Eat. The Flyt platform has the potential to transform the digital journey in the casual dining space and we see huge potential in this technology.”
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Together, Just Eat and Flypay will first seek to introduce delivery support into apps of hospitality operators alongside other key services. The second stage of the partnership will look to provide in-restaurant experiences to the Just Eat customer base, such as pay-at-table support Flypay offers to the likes of Wahaca.
Tom Weaver, CEO, Flypay, added: “This investment, coupled with a strategic partnership with Just Eat, will allow us to rapidly advance our solutions for both operators and suppliers around the world – changing the customer’s digital journey as we know it.
“Flypay’s priority right now is to lay the digital rails to a broad number of hospitality environments, to enable a wide range of technology innovators to create new solutions from the tracks in place. It’s about scale, scale, scale and Just Eat plays an integral part in laying those foundations.”
The foodtech space is a very lucrative market to be in right now. Velocity, which offers a Flypay-esque service to the luxury restaurant space, received a $22.5m series B in August.