Restaurant payment app secures Europe’s largest seed-funding round

A hospitality payment app created by the founders of Big Mamma restaurants has raised Europe’s largest seed-funding round in a sign of confidence in the industry as lockdowns begin to ease.

Sunday, which promises to cut the commission restaurateurs pay on customer bills by at least half, has raised €20m in a seed-funding round from investors including New Wave, a venture capital firm backed by French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, and Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management.

More than 1,000 restaurants and hotels have signed up to the app, including Corbin & King, owners of the Wolseley and Delaunay in London, Four Charles Prime Rib in New York and the Hoxton chain, which runs nine hotels across Europe and the US. It involves customers scanning a QR code on their table to pay the bill without having to catch the attention of waiting staff or take time over credit card machines.

Victor Lugger, co-founder of Sunday, said that when the system was trialled across his Big Mamma group’s 14 Italian restaurants on reopening after lockdowns last year, 80 per cent of customers chose to scan the code and the average spend per head increased 10 per cent “because you have more time for another coffee or limoncello”.

It also saved 15 minutes per table on average, allowing restaurants a quicker turnround between customers.

“Before Covid I would never have put a QR code on my table. It seemed gross and then suddenly it became normal,” said Lugger, who founded Big Mamma restaurants in 2015.

The app could be a boon to struggling restaurants as they begin to open up, in some cases for the first time this year, after months of lockdowns across Europe. Restaurant payment systems have been little changed for the past 30 years — but Sunday cuts the costs for operators to 0.5 per cent per transaction, compared with the usual 1-2 per cent charged by banks.

“Payment has always been the dirty aspect of eating out . . . and sadly often too slow and frustrating,” said Jeremy King, Corbin & King’s chief executive.

Despite restaurants being “tormented” during the pandemic, he added that the crisis had benefited the industry by “advancing technology and systems in one year that would normally have taken five or 10 years to achieve”.

Restaurants in the UK have been able to reopen this week for al fresco dining, but Lugger noted this meant just 65 of the group’s 440 seats in London could be used and that it did not make a profit.

He added that the QR code system was “not the endgame” and said he planned to develop Sunday to work off near-field communications, a contactless technology that links two devices.

The company intends to open four offices in London, Paris, Madrid and Atlanta, and double its headcount to about 90 staff over the next six weeks.