One of the Europe’s largest startup competition has gotten the winning companies to stay in the west coast of Denmark, Esbjerg.
Since Danish startup competition Next Step Challenge has opened the application period for their next batch, it’s fun to update how is it going with TableGrabber at the moment after winning the competition with their software RezGuru in June.
The company with Indian and American roots provides restaurants with a disruptive middle-layer a way to centrally manage their capacity to increase their utilization and to maximize their revenue potential.
It’s not a one-to-one software but a software that enables restaurants to connect with third party suppliers – So it works just like how Amadeus does for airline and hotel industry.
“For the rest of the products there are several competitiors such as Micros, OpenTable, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Quandoo, DeliveryHero and JustEat. But there’s basically no competition for the core middle-layer software,” says Pawan Marwaha, the Co-Founder of TableGrabber.
Marwaha describes that the potential for their software is massive, since just in Europe there are over 500,000 restaurants within in the addressable market segment.
“We’re onboarding several restaurants weekly and expect several thousands within 24 months and we’ve signed contracts with major global customers,” says Marhawa and emphasizes that what makes TableGrabber strong is the deep industry knowledge of restaurants combined with technical expertise from MIT.
Patience, Persistence and Cultural Awareness
While talking about their stay in Denmark after winning the competition, Marhawa describes that Esbjerg offers TableGrabber a central location to easily service their clients in Europe. He emphasizes that Denmark is a very proactive and progressive country when it comes to ease of doing business and transparency.
“Like most growth stage start-ups our team is spread out across different geographies and Esbjerg will remain to be an integral part of our operations,” says Marhawa.
TableGrabber’s €250 000 prize money from Next Step Challenge has helped the company in scaling up their business and improving their sales.
“Our biggest learnings from Next Step Challenge has been patience and persistence. We have patiently and persistently gone after our clients and this has resulted in big sales,” says Marhawa.
Also the experiencing the cultural contrasts has been a fun experience for the team coming from Silicon Valley and India, Marhawa describes: “Coming from big cities like San Francisco and Delhi, it was a pleasant change not to worry about the daily commute and be able to drive anywhere in the city within 15 minutes.”
“The local work culture in Denmark is quite a paradigm shift also. People seem to have figured out the perfect work-life balance – and still be equally productive as their counterparts in Silicon Valley or India. However, the 2 months of businesses shutting down during the summer vacation was a big surprise to us. Everything literally came to a standstill and we still haven’t figured out how to adjust to it.”
