Montreal-based travel app Hopper has acquired Gravy, a company that used data to provide dynamic pricing for restaurant customers.
Gravy allowed restaurants to use anonymized customer purchasing data and trend analysis to find upsell opportunities for customers doing digital orders.
“To their credit, our investors could not have been more supportive and understanding throughout the process.”
In a blog post, Gravy CEO and co-founder Benjamin Walters explained that he would now join Hopper as a GM. Walters is also a co-founder of Feedback, an app that allows people to order food at a discounted price to reduce a restaurant’s food waste. Josh Walters, one of Feedback’s and Gravy’s co-founders, is also joining the Hopper team in product design, according to LinkedIn.
Feedback won WeWork’s $36,000 creator prize in 2017, and Walters noted that the app saved 60,000 meals from landfills and worked with over 350 restaurants. Some of its partners included La Prep, Freshii, and Popeyes. Gravy also recently graduated from the Montreal-based FounderFuel accelerator, which included startups like Willful.
“Hopper has demonstrated alignment in our values of positivity, impact, transparency, courage, and humility and we are so thrilled to have the opportunity to work alongside their amazing organization to continue to empower users by leveraging data to build transparency within an opaque travel industry,” Walters wrote.
At the same time, Walters was frank about the fact that this was not the ideal outcome for the company, writing that Gravy’s runway was running out.
“Despite the excitement we felt towards staying together and working for Hopper, it meant letting our investors down,” Walters wrote. “To their credit, our investors could not have been more supportive and understanding throughout the process.”
Walters said the Feedback app will continue to operate and that the team would have more updates in the future. He also added that he would be part of establishing Hopper’s presence in Toronto. Hopper is currently hiring software engineers in the city, and Walters wrote that more postings would be added.
“After 2 ½ years of grinding, spending all of our savings, paying ourselves well below minimum wage, hiring and occasionally needing to let go of wonderful employees…raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors, pivoting to become a back-end pricing engine, it is time to move on,” Walters wrote.
Photo via Unsplash.