CraftSilicon, yes the same company behind Little ride, has injected 500,000 dollars into EatOut – which is a Kenyan restaurant and reviews website.
EatOut was founded back in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Mikul Shah and the service has grown to be the love of many foodies in Kenya and the East Africa region. EatOut is the same company behind the Nairobi Restaurant Week promotional campaign and the company also runs a food and drink magazine dubbed, Yummy Magazine.
In a press release, it was revealed that the funding was geared towards the development and launch of EatOut’s new mobile payments app and to expand the forks into neighbouring markets.
The new EatOut app will allow customers to pay for their meals through their mobile phones, which they already can thanks to Lipa Na M-Pesa, which recently launched the M-Pesa 1 Tap platform that is bound to make such payments easier. However, Craft Silicon knows this and that is why they are integrating the payments service into several banking apps, how that will work remains a mystery.
EatOut has been testing their new payments platform in a closed beta for the past 12 months and it is said that the app will include a loyalty program to encourage customers to use it.
EatOut has been charging restaurants a commission if reservations are made through the service. They also monetize by serving ads on the website. Seeing that they are now venturing into the payments platform, it will be interesting to see which monetization model the company goes with.
