Ritual builds an order-ahead app focused on remaking the office lunch break by enabling coworkers to piggyback on each other’s pickup orders and socialize the short walk to nearby delis and cafes. The company narrowed its product focus to proving the experience for a single building, simulating the 12–14 spots within a five-minute walk to iterate on the flow. Ritual introduced its "piggybacking" feature about 18 months ago and now has around 44,500 teams using the app. The product combines a consumer ordering flow with tools for restaurants, letting merchants who onboard directly keep the full transaction while Ritual takes a small slice on other transactions and offers marketing options. The company is working on in-store integration challenges—counter space, NFC and QR adoption—and tuning the platform to help restaurants adapt to omni-channel demand. Long term, Ritual aims to be a unified neighborhood platform that gives stores control over their storefront appearance while providing a convenient, social ordering experience for office teams. Ritual is a social ordering app that connects users to their favorite local eateries and enables colleagues to add to orders, pick up, or have food brought to their desks. Founded in Toronto in 2014, Ritual has launched nationally in the U.S. and is available in urban areas including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Customers can order ahead and pay to avoid line and wait times, and the platform rewards frequent users with free food. Ritual reports more than 1,600 restaurants in the U.S. and Toronto and says it has delivered millions of meals and become a daily habit for thousands. Its technology is built on Google Cloud Platform and uses Google BigQuery to produce personalized restaurant and menu-item recommendations from roughly 300 million in-app events and transaction logs. Ritual plans to expand into other cities in the coming months and to widen applications of its technology beyond the food space.

Total raised

$70M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Jun 2018