NEW HARTFORD, N.Y. — PAR Technology Corp., a provider of restaurant software, has acquired Punchh Inc., a major loyalty and customer engagement solutions company for the convenience-store and foodservice channels, for approximately $500 million paid in cash and shares of PAR common stock to Punchh stockholders.
This acquisition makes New Hartford, N.Y.-based PAR a unified commerce cloud platform for enterprise restaurants and retailers and positions PAR to offer integrated point-of-sale, back-office, payment and customer engagement solutions across channels.
“Today there is a conflict between restaurants and technology,” said PAR Technology CEO and President Savneet Singh. “The quantity of new software applications is making it difficult for restaurants to navigate complex integration networks and taking away from focusing on their guests.”
Online marketplaces are becoming intermediaries between restaurants and their customers, he said. “With the Punchh acquisition, we are building a platform that enables restaurants to scale quickly, own their path to innovation and take back their guest relationship,” Singh said. The unified offering “eliminates the need for juggling disjointed vendors, developing cumbersome point-to-point integrations and relying on third-party dependencies. At the same time, Punchh advances our ability to provide customers with an end-to-end solution, from guest-to-kitchen, through one unified data source.”
“In our view, Punchh is the pre-eminent loyalty and CRM SaaS provider to enterprise restaurants,” he added. “It boasts a blue-chip roster of customers, industry-leading growth, 100%-plus net dollar retention and very high customer [net promoter] scores.”
The combined companies, on a pro-forma basis at the end of 2020, would have generated $65 million in annual run rate (ARR), while maintaining growth and net dollar retention, Singh said.
In the convenience retailing space, Punchh provides customer management solutions to Casey's General Stores Inc., Ankeny, Iowa.
“With its Brink POS, PAR has been a Punchh partner for many years,” said Shyam Rao, co-founder and president of San Mateo, Calif.-based Punchh. “PAR’s point-of-sale and back-office solutions combined with our loyalty and engagement platform give customers an end-to-end solution for top-line growth, profitable guest relationships and operational efficiencies.”
Keith Pascal, Act III partner, joins the board of PAR Technology, and Ron Shaich, Act III managing partner and founder of Panera Bread, takes a board observer seat.
“As a founder and long-time CEO of a large restaurant company, I understand first-hand the struggles of trying to power a large enterprise by gluing together disparate technologies from multiple vendors which results in silos of data, increased management costs and barriers to agile innovation,” said Shaich. But restaurant and convenience-store brands that can create a differentiated customer experience, aided by omnichannel technology and an understanding of their customers’ preferences and behaviors, will be best positioned to succeed in the increasingly competitive restaurant marketplace, as well as in retail, he said.
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