• Plate IQ

  Participated · Equity · Mar 2017

  Plate IQ provides Zero-Touch accounts-payable (AP) automation and a payments network (VendorPay) that lets customers pay vendors directly and earn cash back. The platform supports invoice management and payments for recurring and one-time expenses with a cloud-first approach. Plate IQ’s VendorPay network enables vendors to track payment status and reconcile invoices digitally and connects customers to more than 180,000 vendors. The company says it processes more than 50,000 invoices daily, serves over 20,000 customers, and handles more than $1 billion in direct vendor payments annually; it had processed over $2 billion in invoice payments through VendorPay as of October 2021. Since March 2020 Plate IQ added over 8,000 customers, reflecting strong post-pandemic demand for digital payments and back-office automation. Plate IQ’s vertical-first strategy targets restaurants and hospitality today and plans expansion into other verticals such as grocery, professional services, and retail with a pipeline of vertically-specialized products. PlateIQ offers a mobile app that lets restaurant managers photograph paper invoices, automatically digitizes them, extracts invoice data and syncs it with accounting software such as QuickBooks. The platform also enables mobile vendor payments and tracks ingredient costs over time to inform menu and vendor decisions. PlateIQ says it works with more than 1,000 restaurants, including customers such as Nobu Restaurants, the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, Vino Volo and Quince. The company plans to use new funding for hiring and geographic expansion into Europe and Canada and aims to democratize analytics for operations of all sizes. PlateIQ previously faced direct competition from Sourcery, though Sourcery has since expanded beyond restaurants into wholesale vendors and other sectors. The startup positions its restaurant specialization as a way to capture a share of a large market the National Restaurant Association values at $799 billion in annual sales. Plate IQ provides a mobile app and cloud SaaS that uses smartphone photos, OCR and machine learning to convert paper supplier invoices into structured data and analytics for restaurants. The product extracts and categorizes invoice line items, normalizes units of measure and integrates with QuickBooks. Plate IQ launched its SaaS in June and currently serves about 65 restaurant customers, mostly in San Francisco with some in New York, ingesting roughly 1,000 invoices per day and encountering 1,200+ vendors. The company charges a subscription that varies by size and number of locations. Its roadmap focuses on adding predictive intelligence around food pricing and inventory optimization to advise restaurants on when to buy and how to cost dishes. Target customers are restaurants with more than two up to about 15 locations, with larger chains expressing interest once additional features are built.

No current team members are available.