Welcome to tablet hell

Welcome to tablet hell
How Deliverect found massive value in the gaps of the hospitality ecosystem by building a clever order-routing system.

The twin advent of app-enabled delivery services and online payment solutions radically disrupted the restaurant industry. Although many of the tools of the iPhone age deliver great benefits to the hospitality sector, progress comes at a cost: complexity. With multiple competing delivery services and multiple payment solutions operating in the same area, keeping track of all the apps and payment systems can get really complicated, really fast.

Business owners and wait staff have to juggle multiple apps, often on their own dedicated devices. Not exactly ideal during the dinnertime rush hour. Restaurant owners soon came up with a name for the problem: “tablet hell”. If only there were one app to rule them all… And this is where Deliverect comes in. Founded in 2018 in Ghent (Belgium), the company provides solutions that connect delivery orders to payment systems. Both local restaurants and global brands rely on the technology.

Characterizing Deliverect as just a routing service to plug orders into payment systems would do the product a disservice. The app also functions as a single source of truth for delivery apps, serving menus, pictures, and prices to all delivery services at once. With all online sales data in one place, the product offers a wealth of insights into business operations, helping restaurant owners make better decisions. Deliverect also offers load-balancing capabilities, spreading orders among different delivery services to maximize efficiency and decrease delivery times.

During the rush to digitize delivery and payment processes, most of the attention from the press, the public, and investors was focused either on delivery companies such as Deliveroo and JustEat/Takeaway, or on payment/point-of-sale providers with a strong presence in hospitality like iZettle and Lightspeed. As the founders tell it, much thought is spent on disruption and coming up with new first-order businesses, even though there is much to gain from second-order businesses that fill the gaps in newly created ecosystems.

A strong early commitment

We came on board early. In a competitive bidding process for the first round, we significantly outpaced other funds in its initial commitment. Driving this decision was the thesis that there was a significant underestimation of the problem. A deceptively simple solution in a relatively pedestrian market may not have all the glamour, but volume really matters. As we like to point out, any village of reasonable size in the Benelux home market has at least two restaurants - a pizzeria and a Chinese takeaway - so the market must be huge.

Another basic investment tenet of our strategy: only invest in scalable products with a strong code base. Founders going to market with a hastily built minimal viable product who “build the plane while flying” won’t make our funds. In the case of Deliverect, the stability of the product was even more important. With the app being such a crucial piece of infrastructure, any downtime is devastating for the reputation of the platform. All the more reason to have a rock-solid product without rough edges.

Contributing to the confidence in the commitment was the trust in the founding team. Having built Posios, a point-of-sale solution, in the past, two of the four co-founders, Jan Hollez and Zhong Xu, really knew the restaurant business. We also clearly sensed the appetite among the founders; even though they had a successful exit to Lightspeed, they were eager to tackle the next, and even bigger, challenge of building the connective tissue of the restaurant ecosystem. During one of the first conversations they told us the goal was to “hit that Nasdaq gong” - exactly the ambition we like to see.

Scaling up from strong foundations

In the years since the founding of Deliverect, the product has met with great demand in the market. The numbers tell the story: with 1000+ certified integrations with delivery companies and solutions on the payment/point-of-sale side, it’s obvious Deliverect found a strong niche. Global brands like Burger King and Taco Bell use Deliverect, as do cozy neighborhood pubs in the company’s hometown of Ghent. With over 79,000+ locations in 60 countries, the company is on a healthy growth trajectory. With the acquisition of Tabesto in 2024, the company expanded into in-store ordering kiosks.

The true test for the company arrived in 2020 when COVID-19 reached Europe. With customers stuck at home and restaurants closed, efficient home delivery turned into a necessity for the sector. Deliverect delivered: the platform was able to handle the massive increase in volume. This scalability could not have happened if the product hadn’t been up to the task. Another proof of the platform’s scalability is the fact that it works at any scale, from single restaurants to groups with hundreds of locations.

We got in early and led the seed round based on a strong belief in the founders and the mission. As the company gained traction other venture firms joined in and the company reached unicorn status in 2022, and stands at a $1.5 billion valuation as of January 2026 after a $150 million Series D round. This could not have been possible without several first class US-based venture firms like Redpoint, DST Global and Coatue.

Deliverect is far from done. After almost a decade and multiple funding rounds, the founding team is still in place, firmly committed to transforming the company from the connective tissue of an ecosystem to an essential piece of global restaurant infrastructure. As they foresee it there will be an “end of the app era” and a shift to a model where most of the ordering and order taking is done through AI - and Deliverect strives to become the standard protocol for this new era.