Snackpass, a fast-growing startup that’s netted a slew of celebrity investors and popularity on college campuses, has acquired another San Francisco startup, Sleek, that right-sizes (or eliminates) long lines at concerts and food trucks with a "priority lane."
Terms were not disclosed, but Sleek co-founder and CEO Spandana Nakka said in a LinkedIn post that the company's priority was a good exit for investors and its early team consisting of four full-time employees.
“We are happy to finish off with an impressive return in terms of cash and valuable stock in Snackpass, and our entire team joining them as a result of this acquisition,” she wrote.
Snackpass, which allows users to order ahead and pick up food at restaurants, is coming off a hot summer that included $70 million new Series B funding and expansion into new markets including New York and Los Angeles while hitting a milestone of 500,000 users.
Sleek, founded in June 2019 by Nakka and Gaurav Aggarwal, both ex-Google engineers, applies dynamic pricing to high-demand vendors such as restaurants or food vendors at concert venues, stadiums or bakeries where lines stretch around the block.
It holds users place in line and offers a faster “priority lane” for those willing to pay an additional fee determined by models that factor in wide-ranging variables pulled from point-of-sale and GPS data, security camera feeds, weather conditions and the company’s own proprietary sensors. For instance, an ad shows a Sleek user receiving an option to pay $3.21 to slide into a priority pickup lane (wait time estimated: 2 minutes) versus a standard wait time of 51 minutes.
Snackpass does not have immediate plans to implement Sleek's primary feature at restaurants, but the acquisition will make it the default online ordering system at hundreds of festivals and other businesses that use Sleek, which claims more than 20,000 clients. The company can also now add Sleek's more sophisticated wait-time calculations to its own estimates.
In an emailed statement, Snackpass leadership said it saw a high degree of "synergy" between itself and Sleek "in their shared vision for a cashier-less, line-free future for restaurants" and that it was also impressed with the company's technology and engineering team talent.
Sleek says it can boost profits as much as 20% on its first day of implementation. Another point of pride for Sleek is its ease of implementation — rather than requiring users to download an app, the company says it can “with one line of code” integrate with restaurant point-of-sale systems, calculate down-to-the-minute arrival times in real time while determining prices a customer might be inclined to pay to avoid the wait.
Snackpass, founded in 2017, has hit a growth spurt on college campuses where popular food vendors have adopted the company's streamlined system for order-ahead pickup. Restaurants can also use the app for marketing and loyalty programs, and a social component lets users see their friends' orders or order as a group. The company has raised $96 million to date from investors including Craft Ventures, Postmates founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann and celebrities such as Kevin Hart, Bay Area basketball icon Draymond Green and DJ Steve Aoki.
Sleek so far had raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding from investors including Dorm Room Fund, Canaan Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, per Crunchbase.
Nakka indicated the company, as part of Snackpass, is still in rapid-growth mode as it aims to build a team of more than 50 engineers.
