Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), one of the largest and most established venture capital firms in the Mena region, has announced an investment in Eat, Mena’s fastest-growing real-time reservation platform for restaurants.

Eat offers restaurants a cost-effective online reservation and table management system that enables users to reserve a table online in real-time. Equipped with powerful tech and a superior front-end experience, Eat is building a whole ecosystem around its core SaaS offering that aims to fulfil much of a restaurant’s “front of the house” needs.

Eat started its journey in Bahrain where it is today the leading player and has raised $3.4 million to date, including an investment from 500 Startups. It is now experiencing accelerated growth across Mena with customers in Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, amongst others. Eat also has paying customers based outside the region, from over 35 countries globally.

Eat has seated more than 3.5 million customers to date, generating over $250 million worth of orders for restaurants in mainly two countries so far, Bahrain and UAE. It experienced more than 50 per cent growth in covers in some recent months.

On the supply side, Eat has grown its restaurant base four-fold over the last 12 months since it started focusing on its table management SaaS and its monthly revenues by over 250 per cent. The company is receiving thousands of leads per month for its bookings engine and a key use of the current investment would be to increase conversions of these leads.

Eat's fast-paced growth has been driven by strong demand for its cutting-edge cloud products by large F&B operators such as The Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton, and Radisson Hotels, as well as through strategic partnerships with restaurant discovery platforms including TripAdvisor, Google and TimeOut.

MEVP's investment will help accelerate Eat's growth as well as provide expertise in SaaS, scheduling software and overall technology to restaurants. MEVP invested in Shedul, a global leader out of Mena focused on the salon and spa industry, Matic, which is focused on housekeeping and cleaning services and Golfscape, which is focused on golf course bookings across emerging markets.

Walid Mansour, partner at MEVP, said: “Eat is a true success story out of the Bahraini entrepreneurship ecosystem. We believe Eat is well poised to become the leading provider of tech solutions to F&B players across Mena - beyond its current core markets and beyond table management. We think the Eat team has what it takes to make this happen. In fact, the most recent growth figures are a testament to superb execution capabilities. MEVP will support Eat, building on our experience in SaaS regionally and globally.”

“Eat's goal is to bring best-in-class software to restaurants and diners and become a central point to the multitude of online channels that make up today's F&B landscape," said Nezar Kadhem, CEO at Eat. "This investment gives us additional resources to continue to develop this vision regionally, as well as strategically expand into new global markets." – TradeArabia News Service