Salido Raises $2M To Build An Operating System For Restaurants

Restaurant software-maker Salido has raised $2 million in seed funding.

The round was led by High Line Venture Partners and its managing partner Shana Fisher. Also participating were a number of big names from the restaurant world, including chef (and longtime “Top Chef” judge) Tom Colicchio, restaurateur Stephen Starr and chef Ben Daitz of Num Pang Sandwich Shop. Scott Belsky, Accelerator Ventures, 500 Startups and Great Oaks VC invested, too.

Salido aims to offer all the cloud-based software that a restaurant needs to run its business. It was founded by Shu Chowdhury, who spent more than a decade building enterprise software for the aerospace and finance industries.

Before launching Salido, Chowdhury invested in a (now-defunct) New York City restaurant called Niko, and he said he worked in a number of different roles there. At the same time, he said his enterprise background was more applicable than you might expect.

“Whether you’re talking about aerospace manufacturing or financial services, it’s the same stuff,” he said. “When you need to make a trade, it’s no different from placing an order. You have to account for it, you have to know who fulfills it.”

Salido started out with a point-of-sale system (and that’s usually what restaurants buy first), but it now includes reporting, customer management, labor management, inventory and recipes. Chowdhury emphasized the importance of the company’s “end-to-end” approach, which he contrasted with many other tech companies serving restaurants, which tend to focus on one area, whether it’s reservations or payments or deliveries.

By using Salido, Chowdhury said restaurants can get unprecedented insight into their operations and their customer base. For example, they could pull up a list of their top 100 customers who buy red wine, which allows them to tailor their promotions and service accordingly.

“At the end of the day it’s all about the data,” he said. “If we can take that data and help them run their business better, but also strip out the inherent multi-system software costs, this is where we’re changing everything.”

Salido is currently focused on New York, with more than 50 installations in the city, and it plans to expand to 350 restaurants over the next year. Chowdhury said it will also launch an API that integrates its software with online ordering tools.