This startup helps restaurants woo diners with a personal touch

Billion Smiles runs popular restaurants like South Indies and Bon South, specializing in – you guessed it – south Indian cuisine like appam (fermented rice pancake), thenga varatha aracha meen curry (fish cooked in a fried coconut spice sauce), and Malabar biryani. If you’re a regular, and it’s the Malabar biryani that makes you salivate, Billion Smiles will know.

It has built up a database of over 50,000 profiles of diners, with thousands more being added each month. This helps its restaurants to wish customers on their birthdays, get reviews, and send personalized offers. All this happens with the help of a tool called mEngage, developed by restaurant marketing platform Mobikon.

The startup, which began with a team of six in 2009, now has offices in India, Dubai, Singapore, Macau, and the Philippines, serving 200 brands with over 1,500 outlets in nine countries. Today it announced a second round of series A funding of US$2.3 million from Singapore-based Jungle Ventures to expand more aggressively in India and Southeast Asia. Mobikon had previously raised US$1.7 million from Jungle Ventures and Spring Singapore three years earlier.

Anurag Srivastava, managing partner and co-founder at Jungle Ventures, says, “Mobikon has been consistently growing at 9 to 10 percent month-on-month for the last two years and we expect the company to dominate customer engagement for restaurants.”

The new funding will go toward scaling up as well as automating its marketing tools. Samir Khadepaun, co-founder and CEO of Mobikon, says: “The F&B business across Asia is set for a period of unprecedented growth and Mobikon is ideally positioned to spur this growth and at the same time to benefit from it.”

Mobikon’s leading customers in India include Copper Chimney, Little Italy, and Pizza Express. Internationally, Swensen’s, Red Crab Group, and Select Group use the platform. Mobikon plans to double the number of outlets it serves within a year.