Boston-based Incentivio, which has developed an all-in-one intelligent guest-engagement platform for restaurants, has closed on $10 million in Series A funding led by Pennsylvania’s Osage Venture Partners. Washington, D.C. firms Ardent Venture Partners and Grotech Ventures also participated.
“The pandemic accelerated restaurants’ need to evolve with the times and adopt more of a digital presence. Now most restaurants are looking to take their digital guest experience to the next level while simplifying their tech stack,” said Incentivio co-founder and CEO Rajat Bhakhri, a past tech entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard University’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.
“Most small to medium-sized restaurant groups simply do not have the resources to compete with the largest enterprise brands who have multimillion-dollar budgets and large IT teams. That’s where we come in,” he added.
Incentivio’s integrated, AI-driven solution extracts intelligence from a restaurant’s data and drives automated action to elevate the guest journey, said Sean Dowling, Osage Venture Partners’ managing partner. This capability has the potential to create a “category leader in an increasingly critical part of the restaurant tech stack,” he added.
Post-Pandemic Momentum
Founded in 2016 by Bhakhri and chief operating officer Sash Dias, Incentivio taps into advanced machine learning and AI to build a data-driven marketing suite, customer data platform analytics, and guest journey management. It has discovered new momentum since Covid-19, as restaurants hard hit by the pandemic increasingly eyed technology to get ahead.
“We are truly about the art of flavor meeting the science of data,” said Dias, who previously vice president for engineering at IT services firm Aeternum. “The largest enterprise brands have an unfair advantage in leveraging data to drive business results. We want to level the playing field so that all brands can thrive in this digital-first economy.”
Incentivio’s Backers
Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures has raised over $1.4 billion, and made over 150 portfolio investments and 40-plus exits. Its recent portfolio investments include Cloverly, Fount Global, pgEdge, Speedscale, Apkudo, Sunstone Credit and Tellius. Grotech’s recent exits include Perishable Shipping Solutions, of Youngstown, Ohio; Urjanet, of Atlanta, Ga.; and Youreka, of Baltimore.
Industry veteran Lawson DeVries has served as Grotech’s managing general partner since 2020. He has been closely associated with a number of Grotech portfolio companies that have been acquired, among others, by giants such as Cisco and Oracle. DeVries started his career with equity research at Deutsche Bank, and later managed sales at Buckingham Research Group. He has a BA in English literature from Harvard University and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Ardent Venture Partners
Washington, D.C.-based Ardent Venture Partners was founded in 2021 by the duo of Phil Bronner and Phil Herget, who both serve as general partners. Bronner previously was the founder and managing member of Summer League Ventures (SLV). He has also worked at Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Bronner earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Law and an MBA from the Wharton School.
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Herget previously founded Avonlea Capital, after serving Columbia Partners for 25 years, where he rose to become co-managing partner. He earned a B.A. in History from University of Virginia and an MBA from University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Ardent Venture Partners’ recent portfolio investments include Crux, Method Financial, Pickleheads, Givebutter, Financepeer and Gridline.
Osage Venture Partners
Osage Venture Partners, headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., was founded in 2005. It has raised over $300 million from four funds, and made over 60 investments, mainly in early-stage B2B companies, according to Crunchbase. Its exits total 19. Its recent portfolio investments include DeepHow, Fount Global, Curavit Clinical Research, Connectbase, Trinsic, Tellie and DeepSurface Security.
