Our Investment in ResQ: A Leading Back-of-House SaaS Platform and B2B Marketplace

by Mike Ghaffary and Harrison Lieberfarb

Today we are excited to announce that we are co-leading ResQ’s Series A with Tiger Global, and I'm joining the company’s board. ResQ supports the food and restaurant industry, a critical sector of our economy.

Food service is a global industry that is always facing economic challenges. For context, restaurants in North America generate over $1 trillion in annual top-line revenue while spending $900 billion of that on costs. I spent the last decade with a front row seat to the restaurant industry, first running BD at Yelp, then as Eat24’s CEO, and leading CloudKitchens’ Series A. So much of the startup ecosystem has focused on front-of-house restaurant operations: taking orders, staffing kitchens/waitstaff/delivery vehicles, improving customer experiences, and onboarding food tech platforms or apps to help manage it all.?

The global food tech revolution sparked in earnest years ago while I was at Yelp, but the covid pandemic significantly accelerated restaurant adoption of platforms like DoorDash ($70 billion in market cap) and Toast ($25 billion market cap). Anyone who has ordered food online through a service like GrubHub, or paid for food by swiping a card through Square’s contactless hardware has been exposed to how food tech is transforming the dining experience for restaurant owners/operators, employees and customers.?

But that only accounts for half of the market opportunity.

ResQ’s Founder & CEO Kuljeev (KJ) Singh is a visionary who sees massive potential to innovate for a restaurant’s back of house. This is a space that has largely been ignored by most restaurant tech entrepreneurs. Further, KJ brings a wealth of tech, engineering, VC and hands-on restaurant experience to ResQ. In fact, KJ’s own concept restaurant helped shed light on the very back-of-house pain points that ResQ was created to address: restaurant interior upkeep, building maintenance, industrial cleaning and washing, and appliance repair.?

Diving into the world of restaurant ownership allowed KJ to fully appreciate the volume of work done by both front-of-house and back-of-house employees to keep restaurants humming and food on tables. I respect that. And, candidly, it’s a key reason why I’m investing in ResQ.

A real world example of why an investment in ResQ is so critical right now comes from my neck of the woods: San Francisco. In telling this brief story, I’m hoping to showcase the true potential of ResQ’s vision and illuminate the revenue-depleting consequences of ignoring back-of-house concerns like maintenance and repair (addressed head-on by ResQ):

I used to frequent HRD, a Korean/Mexican fusion place in San Francisco, that had the best spicy pork kimchi burrito. Similarly-minded people would travel from all over SF to get one for lunch. As was the case in many restaurants during the pre-pandemic era, a tightly-packed line would form and snake throughout the restaurant for hours every work day as folks waited, then dined on burrito magic.

Over time, smoke from neglected kitchen equipment maintenance, combined with all that burrito production, consumed more and more of the restaurant’s interior. It got so smoky that the famously long line of folks had to be moved outdoors. In the process, the restaurant started to lose customers and revenue dipped due to a drastically impaired customer experience.?

In their case, the restaurant had to close shop completely for months and divert significant revenue to equipment replacement and a remodel. Deprioritizing a mounting back-of-house issue for months ended up costing them dearly.

With KJ at the helm, ResQ is in a position to help restaurants, like HRD, immediately access quality maintenance and repair vendors that could ultimately help keep their businesses afloat, let alone fix timely issues. On a grander scale, ResQ is poised to revolutionize the trillion dollar back-of-house restaurant maintenance and repair market with a SaaS platform designed specifically for industry stakeholders that doubles as a trustworthy B2B marketplace (near and dear to my heart) to match locations with quality vendors.?

Regardless of what the future brings, I’m confident that the broad economic and human impact of ResQ’s back-of-house market opportunity will drive meaningful progress on the supply side of food service. Establishing a vibrant, connected B2B marketplace will also create jobs and expand more lucrative opportunities for restaurant back-of-house vendors who can develop as skilled tradespeople. On a personal note, I’m looking forward to working with fellow ResQ board members and KJ to help make that happen.

Speaking of opportunities, I should mention that ResQ is hiring! Check out their open jobs here: www.getresq.com/careers.?