Companies like Square, Groupon, PayPal and Amazon are all vying to be the primary tech partner for merchants at the point of sale in the U.S., and as more companies replace their legacy equipment with low-cost tablets, the race is heating up elsewhere, too. Orderbird, a startup out of Berlin, is today announcing a further round of $10 million to continue building out its own tablet-based sales technology.
The company, which started its business by first targeting the restaurant industry, plans to expand it outside of its home market of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, to the rest of Europe and beyond.
“We could have been break-even by next year but we’re focusing instead on growing the business,” CEO and co-founder Jakob Schreyer tells me.
This latest round is led by a strategic investor, ConCardis, a JV between different German banks that is the largest merchant acquirer in the country. The round also had participation from private investors in the U.S. and Europe, as well as previous investors. The company has now raised $18 million in total.
After Orderbird raised its first round in May 2012, the company later teamed up with PayPal to offer services to customers and restaurants around the core transactions that Orderbird managed in its home markets.
These included “check-ins” for customers that gave them access to special offers and then linked up their PayPal accounts to offer that as a payment option. Other companies that it partners with help provide services for inventory management and tax accounting.
The idea going forward will be to partner with more companies providing ancillary services to sit alongside OrderBird’s transaction technologies — the idea being that by partnering rather than building everything themselves, OrderBird can come to market faster and offer a more complete service for the small businesses that represent its main market, “so that they can better compete against the Starbucks of the world.”
