Restaurant-tech acquisition valued at $187M, funded with cash and stock
Digital, online-commerce platform Olo, agreed to acquire Wisely, a customer intelligence and engagement platform for restaurants, for $187M. Wisely provides restaurants the ability to use customer data to increase the customer lifetime value, delivering efficient acquisition, retention, frequency, and spend initiatives. The acquisition will give Olo, which connects digital ordering to restaurants, third-party platforms and ordering hubs, the ability to expand its offering, upselling a pool of 74,000 client locations to Wisely’s offering.
Olo-Wisely transaction recap
The transaction will be funded with $110M in Olo Class A common stock and $77M in cash.
“As we look to the future of digital entirety for restaurants, tools that help brands harness customer data and turn it into applicable insights will be essential for them to better serve guests and manage the restaurant enterprise as a whole,” said Noah Glass, founder and chief executive of Olo. “Since partnering with Wisely, we have seen clear synergies between the two platforms and a close cultural alignment of putting restaurants first. We both succeed when our restaurant brands succeed, and there are clear areas of opportunity to provide intelligent products to better serve them. Wisely’s customer engagement platform, operations intelligence, and data capabilities complement Olo’s on-demand commerce platform and will together create a differentiated and wide breadth of product offerings that will accelerate our restaurant brands’ digital transformation.”
Wisely’s software offering includes an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with marketing automation, integrating email and SMS; a hosting, table management, waitlist, and reservations solution; a guest sentiment tracker with aggregated and annotated guest reviews and feedback; in addition to what Wisely describes as the first-ever “Customer Data Platform (CDP) purpose-built for restaurants.”
Mike Vichich, chief executive and co-founder of Wisely, noted, “With our platform, restaurant brands are better able to personalize the guest experience — in the dining room, online, and through digital means—to ultimately improve customer lifetime value. By joining with Olo, restaurant brands will have the ability to unify their transactions and their customers into a single, easy to use system.”
Wisely acquisition rationale
For Olo, the rationale is clear as Wisely’s solutions are complementary to its own, and Olo has worked with the target company for five years. Wisely’s portfolio of services will provide an enhanced experience to Olo’s customers, deepening these relationships. Through Wisely, Olo will create a unified guest profile, providing restaurants an advantage as they increase their digital sales.
Through the purchase of Wisely, Olo becomes a provider of marketing solutions to restaurant clients. According to Glass, the combination of Olo and Wisely creates a vertical SAAS that will give enterprise cients a 360-degree view of their customers, pulling in data from various once-segregated silos.
As Olo broadens its platform offerings, and integrates Wisely’s solutions under its own brand, it starts to reach a broader market, increasing that value by $1B with the inclusion of the types of services that Wisely offers. This better positions Olo to meet the needs of a sizable 300,000 potential restaurant enterprise customers.
The transaction will be revenue growth accretive, according to Olo, and will close in the fourth quarter of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions. The Wisely leadership team, along with its employees, will be welcomed into the Olo organization, as Vichich becomes GM & VP, Customer Intelligence and Front of House for Olo.
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