Restaurant reservation startup Tock, a platform that lets you snag a dinner table after putting down a deposit, has raised a new round of funding as it looks to take on OpenTable and other online reservation companies.
Tock announced Wednesday that it has raised $9.5 million led by Chicago investors Valor Equity Partners and Origin Ventures. Tock has now raised more than $17 million since launching in 2014. Other investors in the round include Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, chefs Thomas Keller and Andrew Zimmern, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Howard Tullman's G2T3V and Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney.
Tock launched as a way for restaurants to cut down no-shows, which have increasingly become commonplace with online reservation services (an OpenTable employee was even fired after making hundreds of fake restaurant reservations on competing online service Reserve).
Tock, co-founded by Chicago restauranteur and Alinea owner Nick Kokonas and former Google vet Brian Fitzpatrick, works to eliminate no-shows by forcing diners to put down a deposit when making a reservation, which is applied to their bill. It also has a feature that lets restaurants offer free reservations.
Tock says it has almost 1,000 restaurants in 23 countries using its software, and diners have booked $369 million in prepaid experiences. Tock users range from wineries and pop-up eateries to Michelin-starred restaurants.
“I originally conceived of Tock to solve problems in my own restaurants,” Kokonas said in a statement. “It is a privilege to now be working together with restaurants around the world to improve hospitality and business practices through the constant innovation and expansion of Tock’s cloud-based features and functionality.”
