OrderAhead
OrderAhead was a mobile ordering and payments company that enabled millions of users to order food for pickup from thousands of local restaurants.[1]
OrderAhead was acquired by Square Inc. in late 2016.[2]
History
OrderAhead was founded by Jeffrey Byun[3] and Henry Lee[4] in 2012 after they completed Y Combinator. The founders started OrderAhead so that customers could easily order food for pickup without having to wait to order, wait to pay or wait to have their food prepared.
OrderAhead started in Palo Alto, California, but quickly expanded to the greater Bay Area after raising a seed round in the summer of 2012.[5] After raising Series A funding one year later in 2013, OrderAhead expanded nationally to major metropolitan areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Chicago and New York City.
OrderAhead’s vision was to reinvent the way the world shops.[6]
Mechanics
OrderAhead was available as both an iOS app and an Android app.
To use OrderAhead, users would connect their credit card to the application, select the restaurant/items they want and place their order. Users would then be given a real-time estimate of when their order would be ready for pickup.
OrderAhead was free for all users.
Funding
OrderAhead raised $10.5 million in funding from Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce), Eric Schmidt (Chairman of Google), Jerry Yang (Founder of Yahoo!), Adam D'Angelo (first CTO of Facebook), Geoff Ralston (President of Y Combinator), August Capital, Matrix Partners, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, CrunchFund, Initialized Capital and Y Combinator.[7][8]
References
- "OrderAhead". Crunchbase.
- "Square Buys OrderAhead to Grab Pickup Business at Restaurants". Bloomberg.
- "Jeffrey Byun". LinkedIn.
- "Henry Lee". LinkedIn.
- "OrderAhead, The Mobile Ordering Platform Backed By $2.5M From Adam D'Angelo & More, Launches In LA; Orders Rise 2.4x". TechCrunch.
- "Forget delivery, OrderAhead hopes to be your one-stop takeout app for everything". The Verge.
- Empson, Rip. "OrderAhead Nabs $2.3M From Adam D'Angelo, Matrix, Eric Schmidt For Ordering On The Go". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
- Tan, Garry. "OrderAhead (YC W11) nabs $2.3M seed for the fastest easiest way to order takeout". blog.ycombinator.com. Retrieved 22 May 2015.