(peHUB) February 22, 2012 – Restorando, the leading online reservation platform for restaurants in Latin America, announced that it has secured $3.2 million in Series A funding. The funding round is led by Emergence Capital Partners, a California-based venture capital firm focused on technology enabled services, with participation from Kaszek, a newly raised fund for Latin America by the founders of MercadoLibre, Atomico, the London-based firm founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, and Storm Ventures. Concurrent with the funding, Santi Subotovsky from Emergence Capital and Alex Mendez from Storm Ventures joined Restorando’s board of directors.
Founded in 2010, Restorando enables restaurants to develop new sales channels to promote available tables and increase revenue, while making it easy and efficient for customers to make reservations online. The company already has operations in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The new funding will be used to expand into other South American markets and continue building the team.
Restorando’s angel investors are Andy Freire and Santiago Bilinkis, founders of Officenet, an office products retail business, which was acquired by Staples in 2004.
Restorando marks the first investment in Brazil for Emergence Capital and Storm Ventures, both of which have deep experience building successful SaaS, cloud, digital media and mobile companies. Increased adoption and activity around Restorando piqued the firm’s interest and convinced Emergence to lead this round and co-invest with the leading players in the region.
“We have a huge opportunity to create value in an industry that currently is not leveraging technology. We will enhance the experience for people dining out and increase the profitability for restaurant owners,” said Frank Martin, Restorando CEO. Franco Silvetti, the company’s COO, added, “Building a regional player following best practices and creating an impact in the region has always been our dream.”
“Emergence has been looking at companies in the region for a while, and after meeting Frank and Franco we saw Restorando had the right ingredients to build a successful company,” said Santiago Subotovsky, Principal at Emergence Capital. “The investor syndicate is the best a company could have in the region, with experienced investors such as Andy Freire, Santi Bilinkis, Alex Mendez, Hernan Kazah, Nicolas Szekasy and Geoffrey Prentice.” Alex Mendez, Managing Director of Storm Ventures, added “Restorando represents the intersection of a great team, a large market, and a compelling value proposition — definitely a winning combination!”
Restorando currently lists more than 800 restaurants in Brazil and Argentina, generating value both for restaurant owners and diners with their innovative platform. In the first year of operations, the Restorando has seated more than 500,000 diners.
About Restorando
Restorando.com is the leading online reservation platform for Restaurants in Latin America. The company was founded by Frank Martin and Franco Silvetti in October 2010, aiming to address the lack of efficiency in the reservation process at Restaurants. The company has operations in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and 4 other cities in Brazil; planning to expand to new gastronomic clusters in the region. For more information, visit www.restorando.com.br .
About Emergence Capital Partners
Emergence Capital Partners, based in San Mateo, Calif., is the leading venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage Technology-Enabled Services companies. Its mission is to help build market leaders in partnership with great entrepreneurs. Emergence partners have funded and helped build more than 50 TES companies, more than any other early-stage venture firm. Emergence Capital has assets of over $325 million under management. Investments include companies such as Salesforce.com (CRM), SuccessFactors (SFSF), HireRight (HIRE), Box.net, Yammer, Veeva and InsideView. For more information, visit www.emcap.com .
About Storm Ventures
Storm Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on investing in seed and early stage companies in the Mobile Internet, Enterprise Cloud, and Internet-enabled Commerce sectors. Storm was founded by a seasoned group of industry veterans with the common vision of sharing our collective experience, passion and energy to help talented and driven entrepreneurs build great companies of enduring value. Storm has invested in over 100 companies including Airespace (Cisco), Appcelerator, BookRenter, Com2uS (Korea IPO), EchoSign (Adobe), IML (Taiwan IPO), Kidaro (Microsoft), Lightera (Ciena), Marketo, MobileIron, NetScaler (Citrix), SandForce (LSI), Sanera (McData/Brocade), and Sierra Monolithics (Semtech). For more information, visit www.stormventures.com .
About Kaszek
Kaszek Ventures is the leading Latin American venture capital firm investing in high-impact tech entrepreneurs. Led by Nicolas Szekasy, MercadoLibre’s former CFO, and Hernan Kazah, MercadoLibre’s co-founder, the firm actively supports its portfolio companies through value-added strategic guidance and hands-on operational help, leveraging its partners’ successful entrepreneurial backgrounds and extensive network. For more information, visit www.kaszek.com .
About Atomico
Atomico is a leading international venture capital firm formed in 2006 by Niklas Zennstroem, a successful serial-entrepreneur and co-founder of Skype, Kazaa and other companies. Atomico seeks to deliver outsized returns to investors by being the partner, and investor of choice, for fast-growing technology companies that will become global category winners. It has so far invested in more than 50 companies on four continents. Atomico is headquartered in London with offices in Sao Paulo and Beijing.