Boulder, Colorado-based POS software provider Arryved has announced a $20 million funding round, which the company plans to invest in brand marketing and expansion.
“To the company’s credit, they didn’t focus as much on marketing — they focused on the customers, they focused on the product,” CEO Loren Bendele told Brewbound. “Right now, we’re at a point where it’s time to tell our story.”
Bendele joined the company last month, taking the CEO reins from co-founder David Norman, who serves as chief operating officer and chief product officer. It was the team assembled by Norman, a former senior software engineer at Google, and Arryved’s customer satisfaction levels, that attracted Bendele to the company.
“Literally some of the best engineers in the world in the payment space if you look at their background and track record with Google Payments,” Bendele said of the Arryved team. “They’re the kind of engineers that can build anything.”
Since its 2016 founding, Arryved has built a portfolio of clients focused heavily on craft breweries. The company has doubled its customer base since the beginning of 2020 with offerings that helped customers pivot to contactless payment (OpenTab) and e-commerce (Arryved Online) during the pandemic. Arryved’s software connects inventory with both handheld devices servers carry so they are able to update guests on changes to the beer list, and client breweries’ e-commerce platforms to offer updated menus.
“It’s been a really hard year for anybody in hospitality,” Bendele said. “We earned a lot of goodwill by working very closely with them to help them pivot during coronavirus and focus on their online stores and focus on growlers to-go, beer to-go and shipping.”
Arryved’s customer satisfaction scores are double or triple those of the company’s competitors in the on-premise POS space, according to a press release. The company has a customer retention rate of 98% and an 80 Net Promoter Score (NPS), a “standardized customer satisfaction benchmark that measures how likely customers are to recommend the service to a family member or friend,” which Arryved described as “highly competitive.”
“You can’t fake the kind of loyalty and passion in comments you see from the customers on Facebook and Reddit and everywhere else,” Bendele said. “It’s obvious it’s a very authentic relationship with our customers.”
Since on-premise restrictions have been eased in most states with the rollout of vaccines, Arryved’s clients are posting record-setting revenues since joining the platform.
“Things are getting back to normal,” Bendele said. “We’re having record days every single day right now.
“Not only have we signed up more locations throughout the past year, but each location is now doing more revenue per day than they were the day before,” he continued. “The world’s coming back to normal; people are coming back out in droves. People are ready to have a good beer right now. We want to make sure our customers are ready for that.”
With its most recent investment round — led by Foundry Group and Tribe Capital — Arryved plans to ramp up sales and marketing efforts and lean on its “track record and experience with craft beverages to expand into additional markets that are beverage-related,” Bendele said.
“That can be nightclubs or music venues or bars,” he continued. “That’s an easy step for us to make because we’re so focused on the beverage.
“We’ve got an amazing sales and marketing team that have just been operating on a very small budget, so we want to give them the budget they need to tell our story more broadly and reach more customers,” Bendele said. “In addition to that, we want to make sure we’re growing the rest of the team on the engineering and the support side to be able to give those customers everything they want after they become customers.”