Liven completes over $152m in acquisitions to create massive hospitality tech group
Liven has today announced the acquisition of Australian-based OrderUp and Abacus, Singapore-based Zeemart and US fintech Copper for a combined $152 million.
Together with Liven – Australia’s #1 loyalty and customer engagement provider to hospitality – the acquisitions create Asia Pacific’s largest end-to-end group providing best-in-class software, services and hardware to maximise profitability, operational efficiency and growth for hospitality, QSR, franchisees, hotels, pubs, and more.
Liven now serves over 6,000 venues and supports billions of dollars of transactions from millions of consumers in Australia, Sth East Asia and the USA. The Group’s customers range from large multi-venue QSR and franchisees to innovative emerging brands and cafes, including Messina, The Grounds of Alexandria, Accor, TGI Fridays, Krispy Kreme, Sushi Hub, Sushi Jiro, Roll’d, Din Tai Fung, Foodle.
With over 200 employees, the Group will be headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, with offices in Sydney, Brisbane, New York, Singapore, and Indonesia.
The combined companies will bring unprecedented investment and innovation pace to the hospitality sector, creating a consistent and compelling customer experience, easing transaction and operations friction and turning every physical venue into a best-in-class digital business powered by AI, next-generation loyalty, data, CRM and more.
Shahrooz Chowdhury, Founder and Co-CEO of Liven, said, “Today we realise our pre-COVID vision to harness the power of AI across best-of-breed technologies and help hospo operators leapfrog over industry-wide challenges holding them back from taking part in this revolution. From self-driving brand loyalty to enriched data insights and automated process management, we’re transforming how they serve their guests from the front of the house to the back.
“Where other companies are horizontally merging around single-point features like ordering or POS to reduce costs, Liven has focused on a vertical acquisition strategy that addresses the core problems hospitality faces – technology and data fragmentation that holds back innovation and increased costs. Most point solutions fuel a world of endless manual processing and tunnel vision. With AI, data, integration and self-driving currency, Liven has created a single connection from the customer through the supply chain. Hospitality is under constant pressure to reduce costs, drive customer engagement and simplify how they operate – today, we answer that need.”
Grace Wong, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Liven, said, “We’ve been quietly building one of Australia’s fastest-growing SaaS technology start-ups. Our platform is fuelled by a constant stream of innovation inspired by insights from leading operators. Now that innovation starts on a single unified platform, magnifying the benefits operators will see and how quickly they will see it.
“The typical hospitality venue runs over 20 siloed applications and technologies to engage customers, run loyalty and rewards, manage the kitchen and business, and process orders and payments. The cost and complexity aren’t sustainable – and are magnified whenever they need support, new features, or to train staff.”
Liven’s unified platform will preserve choice and flexibility while:
- Dramatically lower operating and management costs – through a fully integrated solution.
- Better AI-powered Data & Reporting: end-to-end visibility over your customers and finances in one place – all venue-owned.
- Faster time to cash: faster, more accurate cash flow management. The ability to lock in future customer intent and build a “revenue moat” around the business.
- Deeper customer engagement: the ability to create and generate revenue from a force of “super fans” and community around the Venue.
- Integrated & integratable: keep the existing tech you want with a fully integrated solution that seamlessly integrates your stack with hundreds of the industry’s best platforms, including accounting, labour management, bookings, delivery and more.
- Faster Onboarding & Best-in-class Support: one point of contact for all your needs with deep customer success and support implementing the practices of the best operators.
- Leading-edge innovation: greater investment and innovation across your back-office, POS, table ordering, delivery and digital tools.
What’s in the Liven Group Kitchen
- Liven Loyalty & Engagement – Australia’s leading loyalty & customer engagement platform that ends the discounting cycle and positively incentivises customers to engage, visit and spend more using a venue’s own programmable money (dollars). Liven supercharges customer engagement with Liven Nomnie – a powerful QR-code App builder for brands with eCommerce; Liven Engage for next-generation CRM enriched with every customer interaction and transaction; Liven Insights, a rich data platform; and Liven Perksi for creating rich gamification and orchestration of customer experiences to monetise.
- Abacus – Founded in 2016, Abacus is one of Australia’s largest point-of-sale providers serving hospitality and grocery with a simple and customisable POS solution known for its intelligence, trusted for its reliability (even offline), and loved for its user-friendly interface.
- OrderUp – Australia’s first to market white-labelled table ordering innovators, founded in 2011, serving the largest franchisees, hotels and single venues with table ordering, pick-up and delivery, catering and rich digital ordering experiences.
- Zeemart – founded in Singapore in 2017, Zeemart provides end-to-end orchestration and a springboard for restaurant owners, distributors and CPG brands to start their journey to leveraging AI across their supply chain. They can now automatically capture the foundational training data needed for procurement recommendations bringing visibility and automation to tasks like inventory management, price optimisation and invoice reconciliation. Zeemart is simple to set up, easy to use, and eliminates daily manual tasks.
- Copper – The world’s first and patented API-less integration engine to any POS with AI and machine learning interpreting every transaction to create a unified view of venue performance across one or many venues. Copper supercharges point-of-sale without an upgrade for functions such as QR-code payments, data extraction and more.
Liven’s products will continue to evolve into a fully integrated platform while preserving customer choice to add other technologies should they choose and embracing a broad set of partners. Connecting hospitality to customers and data across systems, apps and devices is one of the biggest challenges companies face in today’s all-digital world. Liven’s open platform seamlessly integrates with major payments providers and applications that operators use to transact, communicate and get work done.
