US-based restaurant reservation app provider Nowait has been acquired by review platform Yelp for $40m in cash, TechCrunch reported yesterday.
Yelp previously invested $8m in Nowait in August 2016 as part of a strategic partnership.
Founded in 2010, Nowait operates an app that enables users to join a virtual queue at restaurants, enabling them to secure a table without physically standing in the door. The app is primarily aimed at casual restaurants that do not traditionally take bookings.
The acquisition will mean the waitlist and seating technology will be integrated into Yelp’s offering to complement the app’s existing reservation and food-ordering tool Yelp Eat24. Nowait’s own app will continue to be developed as a stand-alone offering.
Nowait had raised more than $22m in funding, according to deals database Crunchbase, though some claims are unsourced.
Drive Capital led a $10m series B round in 2014 with participation from unnamed, existing backers.
Birchmere Ventures, Sand Hill Angels and Innovation Works provided more than $2m in series A capital in 2012, following seed funding from AlphaLab Tech Accelerator and Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund.
Ware Sykes, chief executive of Nowait, said: “Right now, we are going to have both apps. We want to make sure we’re creating no disruption for our customers…
“I think there is lots more we want to add to the Yelp network – there are tens of millions of consumers on the Yelp network, and we want to bring that network to our customers. We want to use data to make both our restaurant and our consumer experiences better.”