FinTechInvestment

A restaurant payment solution founded in April of this year has raised £73 million.

sunday’s Series A financing follows a period of rapid growth which has seen it sign up 1,500 restaurants to its platform, which claims to allow customers to pay a bill in as little as 10 seconds.

It has achieved more than a million users and hired 170 members of staff across the US, UK, Spain, France and Canada.

It currently employs 15 people in the UK, which it expects to triple over the next year. The payment service is currently available in 20 UK restaurants, with another 200 signed up and ready to launch. 

The startup was founded by Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux – the entrepreneurs behind The Big Mamma restaurant Group – and Christine de Wende, a tech leader and eCommerce veteran.

The investment was led by Coatue, partners of DST Global and several other high-profile investors from the hotel, restaurant, hospitality and technology industries.

“This new investment round is a remarkable opportunity for sunday to build a powerful tech stack and develop new product features such as ordering & loyalty programs,” said Christine de Wendel, co-founder and CEO US at sunday.

“It also allows us to accelerate in the US market by growing our sales, operations and partnerships teams. We are now in a very good position to hire top talent to drive the speed and stellar execution needed to succeed.” 

Open banking pioneer TrueLayer becomes a unicorn

The QR-based payment solution only secured an £18m seed round in April.

It says its success was made possible by the partnerships that sunday created with a handpicked list of the till systems offering the best technologies and services to restaurant in the UK, such as Lightspeed, Tevalis, EPOSNow, Zonal, Comtrex and soon Quadranet.

It makes payments possible via virtual wallets (Google Pay, Apple Pay) or with their physical bank card (Visa, Mastercard or AmEx), with options for splitting and tipping.

sunday now plans to double its number of team members over the next 12 months with a focus on rapidly expanding the sales and ops teams in the UK.  

“Digital payment solutions are enhancing the customer experience across the board,” said Philippe Laffont, founder of Coatue. 

“We believe that sunday is well positioned to drive this change in the large hospitality sector as evidenced by its strong global growth in just the first five months since going to market. We look forward to supporting the team to help further accelerate their expansion.”