Hospitality tech start-up, Flypay secured a £3.5 million investment from online food delivery giant Just Eat to develop and roll out the company’s new Flyt platform. This latest investment follows the £7 million Series A funding the business secured from Time Out in July 2015.
Flypay was created to improve customer experiences across the hospitality industry, with solutions to reduce the hassle around eating and drinking out in restaurants, pubs and bars.
In 2016, Flypay launched Flyt, a platform for restaurant, pub and bar operators to link all of the digital solutions they use across the customer journey to one unified system for a more fluid experiences.
Just Eat’s investment into the company will help Flypay roll this out for operators across the casual dining sector. The first collaboration will involve integrating delivery into operator-owned apps, blended with other key services and technologies across the customer journey.
The second phase will look at providing Just Eat’s customer base with access to in-restaurant experiences. The final innovation in the partnership will be focused on making it dramatically easier for operators to adopt delivery technology.
According to Just Eat CEO, David Buttress, investing in Flypay strategically helps the company build a seamless experience for consumers who will be able to order, pay, receive customer care and book delivery through the same product. “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,” he said.
The Flyt platform will tie up digital tools from bookings and loyalty, right through to delivery and reviews, and will work in collaboration with all of the major players in each element of hospitality tech, including Flypay’s rival payment companies.
“We’ve enjoyed a phenomenal start on our journey with Flyt. Just Eat is not only one of the world’s most successful and dominant food-tech platforms, but also an amazing technology pioneer.
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,” Tom Weaver, CEO of Flypay said.
“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.”
