BRISTOL, United Kingdom – Ukrainian food industry application developer Stas Matviyenko on Sept. 22 announced raising $1.5 million for his third product in the field, this time for busy lunchtime eaters.
Called Allset, the app lets customers pre-order their meals and book tables at restaurants. Matviyenko’s first two products were Advice Wallet and Settle.
“When you’ve already started working in one industry, it’s better to stay there and improve your product,” Matviyenko told the Kyiv Post by Skype from San Francisco where his startup is based. “You get invaluable experience even from failed products.”
Funding came from Ukrainian venture capital fund SMRK and Alexandr Chernyak, an angel investor who co-founded CarPrice.ru, which raised $40 million in July 2015.
Technically, Allset works under the same business entity as Matviyenko’s projects, so previous investors have stakes in it as well. They include Kyiv-based startup incubator Happy Farm, as well as Russian-based venture capital funds Imperious Group and Life.SREDA.
Targeting busy Americans on the go, the Allset app lets users pay for their orders right away. Matviyenko claims he’s created the first product that combines the pre-order, booking and payment features. However, there are a few apps available that enable pre-ordering takeaway food and drinks, including from Starbucks, Taco Bell, and Domino’s Pizza.
By using the app, according to Matviyenko, users could save up to 30 minutes for what otherwise would be spent waiting for the server, and then for the food.
Eleven restaurants are on board with the immediate app release, though Matviyenko expects the number to increase rapidly in the next few weeks. Allset’s current business model is to take $1 each from the restaurant and user per transaction. It’s a reasonable bargain, the app founder said.
“In the U.S., if you save someone five minutes, it’s already worth $1,” Matviyenko said. “We save 30 minutes. The current model is there for testing purposes, in the future we’ll change it.”
Restaurants can join the service by simply registering and uploading their menu, so geography is not limited to San Francisco, where the startup’s core team of four is based.
Matviyenko’s ventures began in 2013, when together with his brother, Pavel Matviyenko, they founded Advice Wallet, a mobile loyalty program app for restaurants and other venues. The brothers graduated from Happy Farm with this app.
“When Advice Wallet was at its peak with 500 cafes and restaurants, the crisis broke out in Ukraine (in 2014),” Matviyenko said. “Apparently loyalty programmes were not of high priority for those restaurants, and most of them ceased to pay us. So we decided to switch to payment products.”
In 2014, while still working on Advice Wallet, Stas Matviyenko announced his new startup, Settle. Yet another attempt to fix payments in restaurants, the project was essentially a mobile payment system that allowed users to pay for orders.
In the first few months after its launch, Settle was introduced in several cafes and restaurants in Kyiv and managed to raise $300,000 from Imperious Group. Another Russia-based venture capital fund, Life.SREDA, committed $1.5 million in the startup. However in early 2015 it decided to shut down all investment activities in Europe. According to unnamed sources of AIN.ua, the startup ended up receiving some $150,000.
Stas Matviyenko got the idea for Allset while still working on Settle. At some point, he conducted a survey among the service’s users about issues they’d like to see fixed in restaurants. The most popular answer was that people hated to wait for waiters and their food. That’s how the new concept was born.
Settle’s tagline at the moment of writing was “pre-order food and dine at restaurants without waiting,” which is almost the same to what Allset will be doing.
“Settle works with the same model. It has proven successful on the Ukrainian market, it’s reached a turnover of about $90,000 in the first year,” Stas Matviyenko said. “We decided we don’t want to enter the U.S. with this brand because of its history as a pure payment solution. People just wouldn’t know the difference.”
In total, Stas Matviyenko has raised about $2 million for his ever-pivoting business, in which the founders still retain a “pretty big” stake. The entrepreneur plans to spend the latest funding round on marketing and expansion efforts within the U.S.
“I expect that within a month after launch we’ll have restaurants in all (50) states,” Matviyenko said. “But our main goal for this round is to reach New York, it’s a huge market. After that, we’ll raise more money for scaling in the U.S. and expansion into Europe.
Freelance writer
Andrii Degeler can be reached at [email protected].The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
