ChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, has acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that aggregates all orders from delivery apps into one place.
This marks ChowNow’s first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants deal with ordering across multiple services.
However, as part of the acquisition, ChowNow laid off about 30 employees, bringing the total workforce to 300. Meanwhile, Cuboh’s entire 30-person team — including marketing, sales, product and engineering — is moving to ChowNow .
“Unfortunately we’ve made a small layoff as part of the restructuring to better position us,” ChowNow co-founder and CEO Chris Webb told TechCrunch. This comes after the company laid off 100 people in 2022. Webb later told TechCrunch that 60 people were laid off, but that 30 people joined through Cuboh, resulting in a net loss of 30 employees. He also said no further layoffs are planned.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Launched in 2012, ChowNow connects customers with local restaurants and helps businesses gain an online presence by providing customized online ordering systems and marketing support. It also offers a delivery system that pairs restaurants with delivery drivers.
It does not charge a commission like its competitors and allows restaurants to keep 100% of their profits. ChowNow counts over 20,000 small restaurants as customers and has helped process more than 250 million online orders. The company says it saved restaurants $700 million in fees.
ChowNow is a profitable company and has raised about $80 million to date, Webb said.
Cuboh is a notable addition to the company. Previously, ChowNow’s dashboard could only manage a restaurant’s internal menu. Now restaurants no longer have to manually manage all their menus, reducing the potential for mistakes and general chaos in the kitchen. Menus can be updated in all delivery apps to reflect unavailable products and price increases, among other changes.
Starting next week, restaurant owners can access a newly launched package, “ChowNow + Cuboh,” for $275 a month. The package combines ChowNow Pro ($199), the company’s flagship product that handles all ordering, marketing and operations, and Cuboh’s POS solution, which ranges from $100 to $200 per month.
And while ChowNow’s platform already integrates with more than 30 POS systems, Cuboh offers 14 additional tabletop integrations, including Clover, Lightspeed, Brink, Micros, Revel, POSitouch, Square, Par, Dinerware, Aloha and more.
In the future, ChowNow wants to create more integrations, such as one for catering services.
“We’re going back to the long-term product vision of what we’re building, that it’s the only platform that restaurants need for their entire takeout business,” Webb said.
