Restaurant tech startup Salido raises $2M

Salido, a startup that describes itself as “the restaurant operating system,” is announcing that it has raised $2 million in additional funding.

This round from strategic investors doubles the $2 million in seed funding that Salido announced last year. Phil Suarez, who partnered with French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten to launch well-known restaurants including ABC Kitchen and the eponymous Jean-Georges, led the new funding.

Founded by Shu Chowdhury, Salido started out as a point-of-sale system for restaurants and has expanded to a broader set of tools that allows restaurants to manage their customer data, their workforce and their inventory. Chowdhury said that at first, this approach “was very unpopular because it wasn’t sexy,” but it’s become more compelling, particularly because of the comprehensive data that Salido has been able to collect.

“Our goal is to fix the inside of the restaurant,” Chowdhury said. “We know that the feature set and the data model that we’ve built addresses the needs of the restaurant. We don’t believe reservations is a business, it’s a feature. We don’t believe ordering is a business, it’s a feature.”

For example, he said that Salido has restaurants’ menu information, “I can easily open it up to online ordering,” which can also mean connecting with reservation systems like OpenTable.

In addition to working with high-end restaurants, Salido also has customers from the more casual side, including Num Pang and ‘Wichcraft. Chowdhury isn’t saying how many restaurants Salido is currently working with, but he did note that the system has processed $27 million to date for more than 1 million total guests.

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