Customer engagement platform Mobikon sees opportunity in restaurants

Mobikon helps restaurants improve their business by connecting to their customers the right way

Gajalee, a seafood restaurant in Mumbai in business for 29 years, boasts of its expertise in serving delectable Maharashtrian coastal cuisine. But, the eatery is niche, attracting a limited clientele. That is when Mobikon came in as a partner and helped Gajalee to improve customer satisfaction through feedback and marketing insights. Mobikon claims it has helped Gajalee to improve its annual revenue by 15 per cent.
 
Mobikon, a customer engagement and analytics platform for the hospitality industry, helps restaurants improve their business by connecting to their customers the right way. It is a pioneer in in-store feedback and launched its first app in 2011, testing it on 15 outlets of Pan India Foods, which became an early adopter of its technology.
 
Product acceptance increased over the next couple of years and from 2,000-3,000 instances of feedback per month, Mobikon now generates 160,000 per month. It has over 3,000 restaurants on its platform and a presence in India, the UAE, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
 

In August, Mobikon raised $7 million in Series B funding from a three-member consortium: Sistema Asia Fund, the proprietary fund of Russia’s largest conglomerate Sistema JSFC; Singapore-based C31 Ventures; and Qualgro. Its existing investors Jungle Ventures and Spring Singapore also participated in the round.
 
The company has raised $12 million so far, including $1.7 million in the first institutional round in September 2012 from Jungle Ventures.
 
Business model
 
Mobikon’s business model is based on software as a service (SaaS). It charges restaurants monthly fees based on the number of modules they use. It powers over 160,000 in-store customer feedbacks a month and the unique diner engagement is 400,000 per month. Mobikon is aiming for 500,000 unique diners engaged per month.
 
“We have grown over 200 per cent last year and will continue to grow at the same rate this year. Over 9 million unique diners have engaged with us so far,” says Samir Khadepaun, chief executive officer and founder, Mobikon.
 
The company offers restaurants services such as payments, online ordering, analytics, campaigns and CRM. It works on a plug-n-play model to add modules as brands grow.
 
Initially, Mobikon was focusing on international markets, given the small funding at that time. As it scales up, Mobikon is planning to bring in a new platform on which restaurants will receive more benefits in terms of analytics, marketing, industry insights, design and staff training.
 
Opportunities and challenges
 
With more restaurants embracing technology for customer engagement, operations and analytics, Mobikon sees a big opportunity in Southeast Asia, India, West Asia, Africa and Europe.
 
“Mobikon has the first-mover advantage in building a repository of unique and global customer profiles with reference to their eating preferences. The real value of the business is in the data that is captured at every touchpoint,” says Dhruv Kapoor, managing director, Sistema Asia Fund Advisory.
 
The challenge is Mobikon must manage scale in multiple countries as there is demand from all quarters. The company has to master different go-to-market strategies in these regions.
 
Khadepaun says the key challenges are ensuring a great product, building a strong team, having the right amount of funding and delivering the right value to restaurants.
 
Way forward
 
Mobikon is planning to use the latest round of funding to scale up its business in India, Southeast Asia and the West Asia.  “We will be a global company recognised for a great product,” says Khadepaun.

Expert Take: Right time to offer comprehensive software to niche industries
 

Vinod Muthukrishnan Co-founder & CEO, CloudCherry

This is the perfect time for specialist SaaS players to offer comprehensive software to niche industries. We are seeing that in the wellness and restaurant industries.
 
With an integrated Mobikon solution, the technical complexity for restaurants is greatly reduced.
 
Vertical specialisation comes with the tradeoff that the vendor needs to develop all modules relevant to a restaurant's operation. Sometimes this means depth is compromised for all-round coverage. That is when the larger customers seek vendors that specialise in different products like CRM, POS or feedback. The product focus thus needs to be on each product category and aligned to where Mobikon believes F&B is headed.