LAVU gets Sourcery
‘A perfect complement’ to modern restaurant technology
Accounts payable business ‘a perfect complement’ in modern restaurant technology
Homegrown tech success Lavu Inc. has acquired the Silicon Valleybased startup Sourcery for its automated accounts payable platform for restaurants.
The purchase will allow restaurants to add automated online payments management to Lavu’s pointof-sale software services. Lavu announced the deal Wednesday after closing on it last week for an undisclosed price.
Restaurants still generally receive paper invoices from many vendors, wasting a lot of time on manual payment processes, said Lavu CEO Saleem Khatri. Sourcery’s technology eliminates that paper trail by transferring accounts payable to the cloud.
“You just take a picture of the bill, it uploads to the cloud and goes straight into payment software,” Khatri told the Journal. “It will make restaurant managers’ lives easier, allowing them to focus on other tasks and run their businesses more efficiently.”
The Sourcery system also improves analytics and tracking by saving, coding and categorizing information for future use with the data accessible from anywhere at anytime, Khatri said. Payments are automated and sent through a secure, online bill pay platform with invoices processed quickly and easily.
It’s an end-to-end payment system, said Sourcery General Manager Teri Wilson.
“Lavu is the perfect complement to Sourcery, bringing modern restaurant technology to all aspects of the management process,” Wilson said in a statement. “We are eager to see the success restaurants can achieve with the combined power of the Lavu and Saucery platforms.”
This is Lavu’s second company acquisition since April, when it purchased the Pennsylvania-based company MenuDrive, which offers an online ordering platform to provide virtual ordering and delivery options for restaurateurs.
The acquisitions reflect rapid growth at Lavu, a homegrown startup that launched in Albuquer
que in 2010 with proprietary software for restaurants to manage all services on mobile devices in real time on a single, integrated platform. Table servers, for example, can take orders directly on tablets or smartphones, allowing cooks to instantly read them on screens in the kitchen. The meals are automatically logged and processed for payment at a tablet-based register.
The company, which won a $15 million venture investment in 2015 from Washington, D.C.-based Aldrich Capital Partners, is working to broaden its suite of services, when possible through acquisitions of other companies.
“We’re always interested in niche pieces of technology for our customers like the Sourcery platform,” Khatri said. “Rather than build it ourselves, we acquired it.”
About 10 Sourcery employees will now join the Lavu workforce. The company currently employs about 200 people, about 65 percent in Albuquerque and the rest in Florida and India.
Lavu no longer publicly discusses revenue. But the company, which has customers in 98 countries, is growing fast.
“We had our two best quarters ever in the first half of 2019,” Khatri told the Journal. “It’s the highest it’s ever been. And July will be the best month ever from a revenue perspective.”