Uber Eats acquires SA founded tech firm orderTalk for undisclosed amount

Uber’s food delivery business Uber Eats has acquired SA tech company orderTalk from Knife Capital, the Cape Town based venture capital (VC) firm revealed today (23 May).

OrderTalk provides online ordering software to restaurants that integrates with a restaurant’s point-of-sale system. Knife Capital’s announcement was revealed in a news story by SA tech site TechCentral.

The terms of the deal — including how much Uber Eats paid Knife Capital and orderTalk in the deal — were not disclosed.

OrderTalk was founded by Hilton Keats in 1998. Today it is based in Dallas, Texas.

Uber’s food delivery business Uber Eats has acquired 100% of SA tech company orderTalk

Knife Capital invested R9-million in the company in 2008 and took a “significant minority” stake in the business, Knife Capital partner Keet van Zyl revealed in a podcast with Techcentral today.

Uber Eats said the acquisition will allow it to “streamline workflows by directly integrating with leading point-of-sale systems”.

Last Wednesday Uber Eats head of business development Liz Meyerdirk revealed in a statement carried on orderTalk’s website the company’s two-fold strategy behind the interest in POS integrations.

She said, restaurants are looking for ways to reduce errors, and an employee manually entering orders from an Eats-connected iPad into the restaurant’s system “leaves room for plenty of human error”.

In addition, technical integrations better manage restaurant workflow. Instead of requiring a middleman, orders are quickly fed to the kitchen display monitor or ticketing system.

Meyerdirk said that the majority of the company’s employees will stay on for now. “We’ll retain orderTalk’s point of sale technology as well as several engineers who will relocate to Uber’s New York office,” she said.

However Uber Eats plans to wind down other orderTalk features, namely, supporting the ability for restaurants to accept online orders, over the next year.

In the statement orderTalk CEO Patrick Eldon said he was proud of everything his team has built over the past few years. “We’re excited to leverage our point-of-sale expertise to make Uber Eats an even better partner for restaurants by helping them easily integrate online orders and grow their business.”

In a tweet today (see below) Justin Stanford, founder of Cape Town VC company 4Di Capital, said Knife Capital has demonstrated that one can launch a SA VC fund and close it out with a great return to investors. “Congrats guys, ecosystem validated!” he tweeted.

Featured image: Uber Eats via Youtube