U.S – Zenput, the leading operations execution platform, has raised US$ 27 million in Series C financing, led by Golub Capital, a U.S.-focused credit asset manager, to continue developing its application to automate operation procedures like tracking food safety, public health protocols and changing market conditions.
The Series C round comes as the company saw 100% revenue growth over the past year. At the same time, product usage more than doubled at stores.
The San Francisco-based company expects to see a surge in its technology users over the next 12 months as locations aim to find ways to do more things remotely.
Restaurants, convenience stores and grocery chain customers can use Zenput to update all of their locations simultaneously with new processes, promotional campaigns and key initiatives while also gathering data and insights from those locations to find opportunities for improvement.
Joining Golub in the round were existing investors, including Jackson Square Ventures, MHS Capital and Goldcrest Capital.
As said by TechCrunch, the company’s co-founder and CEO Vladik Rikhter revealed that this brings the company’s total funding to over US$ 47 million.
Greg Gretsch, founding partner and managing director at Jackson Square Ventures, led Zenput’s Series A round in 2016 and had met Rikhter a year prior.
At the time, Rikhter was in the early stages of developing what Gretsch called an organization task manager.
While he didn’t invest then, he kept in touch with Rikhter and saw how much of a grinder he was in expanding the platform.
“When he sees a problem, he works and works to solve it. Whenever you have a multilocation business, you have a remote management problem. You’re trying to manage everything so your weakest link can perform as best as the best link, but you need a platform to manage that so that you can hold stores accountable to improve the end product,” Gretsch said.
Front-line workers use Zenput’s mobile app for onboarding at the beginning of the day and to track safety compliance and fresh food checks, something Rikhter said was historically challenging once a business had thousands of locations.
The app can also alert when food has been left out too long to assist in lowering food waste rates.
“The pandemic inadvertently helped us. Initially, it was rough, but then a lot of the brands we dealt with needed to expedite technology and saw an opportunity to invest in our technology. We have more products coming because there is more that can be done to make sure every meal is a safe meal,” he added.
Much of the new funding will go toward building those new products and capabilities and into marketing to expand the customer base.
The company recently launched an expansion of its Zenput for Franchisors tool and updates to its food prep labeling and temperature monitoring functions.
Since its founding in 2012, Zenput is currently used by customers like Chipotle, Domino’s, P.F. Chang’s, Five Guys, Smart & Final and 7-Eleven in over 60,000 locations across more than 100 countries.
