Qikserve
QikServe's software allows patrons to order and pay for food and beverages using their own devices or operator-provided tablets and kiosks.
The opportunity: QikServe’s innovative software, allowing the hospitality industry to automate service provision and improve customer experiences was seen as a win-win. Staff in hospitality are often overworked and poorly paid, leading to a sub-optimal experience for customers. The hospitality industry itself is characterised by high rates of business failure, particular in the restaurant segment.
The outcome: While QikServe made steady progress in building out a robust software offering with increasing levels of functionality, finding a compelling value proposition for an industry that spans global players at one end with tens of thousands of outlets to single outlet businesses at the other took some doing. QikServe’s defensible pricing model was also often overshadowed by would-be competitors’ more eye-catching, but unsustainable, approaches (which resulted in periodic waves of well-funded, but short-lived, competitors that sucked up risk capital and destabilised market demand for the services offered to the industry). Eventually, it took a pandemic (as well as a lot of hard work) to put QikServe into a proper growth trajectory. Due to limits on the aggregate capital that could be invested in QikServe from EIS and VCT investors, a decision was taken to market the company rather than try to secure a new lead investor. QikServe was acquired by the Access Group in September 2024.