RIYADH — Taker, the leading Saudi-based Software as a Service (SaaS) startup that provides an online ordering management platform for restaurants, has announced Thursday, that the company has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding. The investment round was led by 500 Startups, Saudi Venture Capital (SVC) and a group of leading angel investors. The newly raised funds will be deployed to invest in Research and Development(R&D) to adapt with the new trends in the market and further augment its proprietary technology platform. Founded in January 2019 by CEO Abdullah Alsaadi, Taker is at the forefront of revolutionizing the online Food & Beverage (F&B) industry, a category that is rapidly developing and is worth billions of dollars globally. It is the most advanced management platform for restaurants of any size that want to open their online branch and scale customer orders. The company is unique as its service takes care of all of the problems involved in developing a website and/or building an app to order food online. Restaurants that sign up with Taker can get their own branded ordering channels, almost instantly. Furthermore, Taker also integrates its system with the restaurant POS systems and payment gateways and additional add-on services. These significant features play a major role to improve efficiency and streamline their internal operations inside the kitchen and manage the increased volume of orders. Commenting on the fund-raising announcement, Alsaadi said: “We are proud to have such prestigious and judicious investors that not only provide us with capital but also have vast strategic experience in the region. Among themselves, our investors have backed some of the most disruptive companies in tech and are confident that Taker has great potential to become the market leader in the years ahead. “At Taker, our mission is to make the food ordering process easy and delightful for both our clients and their customers. With the newly raised capital, our highly ambitious team looks forward to further enhance our online capabilities. With the onset of COVID-19, over the past few weeks, we have witnessed a significant surge in demand for our services and hope to see more offline restaurants take advantage of our offerings as we forge ahead to meet the growing demand by facilitating a robust online ordering management platform.” Sharif El-Badawi, managing partner, 500 Startups said: “Surging demand for online food ordering has resulted in many offline restaurants signing up with Taker within a short period of time. Abdullah and his team have been working very hard to achieve double-digit growth month-on-month and this has made us proud. “Their niche product has found an end-to-end solution that works successfully for their clients and stands as a testament of Taker’s positioning, as one of the leading platforms in the MENA region. We are excited to collaborate with Taker and look forward to a great future for the company.” “Some of Taker"s clients had previously failed in app development and building customized websites. having switched to our platform, they have witnessed greater brand visibility, and increased volume of orders on their app compared to some of the food aggregation apps thereby resulting in huge savings on commission payouts. “We believe that in terms of feature-density, user experience, and quality of integrations, we are the best-in-class B2B software-as-a-service provider in the F&B sector,” added Alsaadi. — SG