Say bye to waiters and hello to smartphone orders with this startup

Photo credit: Eunoia can save restaurants 30 to 40 percent in monthly costs.

While that’s by no means the norm in most restaurants, it could be if Singapore-based Eunoia has its way. And it wants to take it even further – let you browse the menu, order, and pay, all from the comfort of your own smartphone.

A lot of food and beverage (F&B) businesses currently use various methods for ordering and paying, like the aforementioned menu tablets and digital point-of-sale systems to accept and process payments. Eunoia’s goal is to get all these services, no matter who made them, into one system that the customer can access through their phone without even having to download anything.

The online platform in question is Ordr and it promises to take care of these services for restaurant owners without too much hassle on their part. The service will also support orders and payments made to restaurants through food delivery startups like Deliveroo and Foodpanda.

One service to rule them all

The idea for Eunoia came about while founder Wee “Zwee” Zihuan worked on a project for PayPal through his consulting firm Savant Degrees. “We were tasked with designing a new dining and payment concept,” he tells Tech in Asia.

The major challenge, they found out, was how to integrate the system into a restaurant’s point of sale. “We realized that if we could solve that issue, other innovations like delivery services could fit into the same seamless experience.”

Eunoia’s solution to this is to get makers of such systems to partner with it and adapt their product to its platform. This way, it will be able to accommodate as many different apps as possible, helping F&B businesses choose the services they need.

An idea of what the Ordr platform will look like. Photo credit: Eunoia.

It’s worth wondering whether app builders (Eunoia calls them “tech providers”) will be willing to work with the startup on this. Zwee figures there are good reasons to do so, saying it will allow them to grow their client base and revenue while getting rid of added costs – for example, providing tablets to restaurants to get them to use their apps.

With Ordr, restaurants can save about 30 to 40 percent in monthly costs, Zwee says. Ordr can be implemented for a fee of US$92 per month. Assuming a restaurant pays four service staff a monthly wage of about US$1,800 each, Eunoia claims a restaurant with 20 tables using Ordr can save more than US$40,000 a year, since it can hire just two employees.

First steps

Eunoia launched today with US$590,000 in seed funding. The investment comes from Singaporean asset and wealth management firm Golden Equator Capital. It’s part of a US$40 million technology fund the company raised toward the end of 2015.

The Singapore government is trying to kickstart innovation in the F&B sector.

Zwee says the startup will use the funding to reach out to restaurants and cafes for free pilot projects and to start presenting its work in integrating point-of-sale systems to its service. It will also run trials for consumers to get them used to ordering and paying at a restaurant with just their phones.