"Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary has taken a stake in a Minneapolis-based startup.
Tavolo — a platform that helps restaurant owners automate their marketing — raised $1 million in its first institutional round of investment. O'Leary Ventures, based in Miami, and Groove Capital in Minneapolis led the investment with additional investment from Techstars.
Tavolo CEO and Co-Founder Taranvir Johal said the company will use the funding to make its platform more robust and continue the growth of the product.
"Kevin sees the impact of content creation and fully understands how much impact that can have on a business," Johal said. "He knows the ins and outs on what to do to make a business successful."
Tavolo's platform aggregates data across a restaurant’s analytics, like inventory and online ordering, plus macro trends in the market to auto-generate marketing materials. The startup works with about 78 restaurants across the Twin Cities, Fargo, Milwaukee and New York.
Last year, Tavolo was the first Minneapolis-based startup named to the sixth cohort of Ecolabs and Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator. Johal said the Farm to Fork Accelerator's "mentor madness" — an event that offers brokers meetups between founders and mentors — helped the company network with people like O'Leary.
"It was an incredible experience, we got access to so many people," Johal said. "It felt like we were on a rocket ship. The biggest takeaway from the experience was the power of a network. We didn't realize how much it would impact our business."
Johal said looking forward, the company wants to make its platform ubiquitous. Additionally, the company is looking to expand past marketing for restaurants and provide the platform to different industries.
