How Payment Startup Swipely Uses Data to Help Restaurants Grow Sales

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article wrongly said that Swipely was founded in 2012. 

Many restaurants struggle with measuring key business drivers, like which menu items perform best, who their top 100 customers are and which servers have the most success selling specific menu items. But thanks to a handful of restaurant tech startups, collecting, analyzing and leveraging this data is becoming seamless and a part of everyday operations.

Founded in 2009, Swipely, one such startup, is providing 1,000+ restaurants (among other local business clients) with insights and data to help them better understand their customers and grow sales. The payment processing company compiles and analyzes data from payment networks, POS systems and the social web to provide restaurants with financial, operational and marketing data, as well as actionable insights for things like menu item profitability and staff training to boost revenue and tips.

Swipely has raised $20.5 million from First Round Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures and others, and today it announced that it’s currently managing $2 billion in annual sales, providing insights on more than 10 million consumers in 40 states. The startup also announced the launch of new features geared towards helping multi-unit restaurant operators make smarter decisions, including sharing customer profiles and sales trends across all locations.

As far as its 5 year plan, “Expect to see Swipely add more insights and bring more value over time to our merchants. Our vision is to become the online operating system for local commerce, bringing online innovation to the 95% of retail that happens offline,” Senior Marketing Manager Elizabeth Ducoff tells me.

Swipely’s VP of sales, Matthew Oley, demoed the startup’s technology and spoke about its business model and growth at our January Food+Tech Meetup ‘How New Tech is Transforming Restaurants” (video below).