History
Chowbus was conceived from the experiences of co-founder Linxin Wen, who, upon moving to the U.S., realized the difficulty of finding genuine Asian restaurants on existing delivery platforms and the high costs associated with their delivery services. [3] Inspired by this challenge, Wen, along with Suyu Zhang, launched Chowbus in 2016 to support these restaurants by providing a dedicated platform. [4]
Starting with a focus on delivery, Chowbus soon extended its reach to over 20 cities across North America, Canada, and Australia, featuring menus in multiple languages including Mandarin and Cantonese. The platform offered a selection of Asian cuisines such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Indian. [5] By 2022, alongside its successful delivery model, Chowbus expanded into the SaaS market, introducing restaurant management software and POS services. This shift aimed to support especially those restaurant owners new to the country, helping them with technological and marketing needs. [6]
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on seed stage, early stage investments and growth stage investments in the enterprise, fintech, consumer and healthcare sectors. Lightspeed has eleven offices globally and as of 2023 had approximately US$25 billion in assets under management.
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Upserve, originally Swipely, provides a restaurant management platform which allows independent full-service restaurants to run and manage their entire business. The Platform is made up of restaurant-specific point of sale (POS) software, payments, and analytics, online ordering, loyalty, and marketing tools designed specifically for restaurants. At the center of the Upserve Platform is the cloud-based Upserve POS, a point of sale system that Upserve acquired from Groupon in 2016.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $35 billion as of March 2022.
Zomato is an Indian multinational restaurant aggregator and food delivery company. It was founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008. Zomato provides information, menus and user-reviews of restaurants as well as food delivery options from partner restaurants in more than 1,000 Indian cities and towns, as of 2022–23. Zomato rivals Swiggy in food delivery and hyperlocal space.
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Lightspeed Commerce is a point-of-sale and e-commerce software provider based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It was founded in 2005 by Dax da Silva, who served as the CEO of the company until February 2, 2022. It has offices in Montreal, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Belfast, Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Ghent and Melbourne. It offers its services to retail, restaurant, and hospitality businesses.
Oregon Venture Fund makes venture investments in the Portland, Oregon area and throughout Oregon and SW Washington. The fund consists of 180 institutional and angel investors, of whom 85% have run or founded a business. The fund evaluates up to 300 business plans per year, selecting five to seven to invest in annually. In 2018, the fund changed its name from Oregon Angel Fund to Oregon Venture Fund and launched a new $30M fund. Since its inception, Oregon Venture Fund has generated an average annual rate of return of 34% and a return on investment exceeding $3.50 for each dollar invested.
Careem is a Dubai-based super app with operations in over 70 cities, covering 10 countries across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia regions. The company, which was valued at over US$2 billion in 2018, became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Uber after being acquired for $3.1 billion in January 2020. Careem expanded into the food delivery business with Careem Now in November 2018, which evolved into Careem Food as well as the rapid grocery delivery service Careem Quik in 2020, and launched a digital payment platform, Careem Pay in April 2022. In April 2023, Careem's Super App business was spun out into a new legal entity, which e& acquired a 50.03% stake in, while Uber maintains full ownership of Careem's ride-hailing business. The Super App currently offers 20 digital services in the UAE including ride-hailing, food, grocery, micromobility, DineOut, and a subscription-based service - Careem Plus, amongst others.
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ChowNow is an online food ordering platform that connects customers with local restaurants. Christopher Webb and Eric Jaffe, American entrepreneurs, founded the company in 2011 with headquarters in Los Angeles, California.
Swiggy is an Indian online food ordering and delivery platform. Founded in 2014, Swiggy is headquartered in Bangalore and operates in more than 580 Indian cities, as of July 2023. Besides food delivery, the platform also provides on-demand grocery deliveries under the name Instamart, and a same-day package delivery service called Swiggy Genie.
Getir is a Turkish company, operating in several countries until 2024, founded as a startup company in 2015 that offers rapid on-demand delivery services for grocery items and a courier service for restaurant food deliveries, accessed via a mobile app.
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