We are excited to announce the sale of Laconia’s portfolio company, xtraCHEF, to Toast, the end-to-end cloud management platform purpose-built for the restaurant community.
xtraCHEF bolsters Toast’s offering with a suite of back office tools for restaurants, including accounts payable automation and inventory management. Designed from the ground-up for restaurants of all sizes, xtraCHEF arms operators to take control of rising inventory costs, automate accounts payable, and streamline back office tasks to increase overall profitability.
When we first met xtraCHEF CEO Andy Schwartz and his CTO, Bhavik Patel, in the Fall of 2017, their vision for automating a restaurant’s manual back office vendor workflow seemed exactly where the metaphoric puck was going. It was inevitable that if xtraCHEF couldn't do this, then some other company would.
But, Andy and his team were special from the start. Beyond having the tech chops to create this product, Andy from the very beginning demonstrated all of the qualities we look for in a founder: confidence, humility, smarts, transparency, and bulldogged grit. He also happens to have a kind and generous spirit; he’s a person people want to be around. Whenever we’d walk into his offices in Philly, the atmosphere was happy and productive.
Of course, please don’t think building xtraCHEF was a walk on the beach. Restaurant tech is a super competitive space and, well, we all know what happened to that industry during the past COVID year! Andy and his team took it on the chin last spring and summer. But, they supported their customers through the hardest times and are now having record months as life begins to return to normal in the US.
It’s tremendously meaningful when we can support such talented entrepreneurs as Andy, Bhavik and the xtraCHEF team. Bravo to you all!!
You can read more about the acquisition here .