Boostly Raises $5.6 Million Seed Round
Boostly secures $5.6 Million Seed Round "to provide rocket fuel for restaurants." Trestle Partners led the financing. Relish Works, Singularity Capital, and Y Combinator also participated.
Money
August 6, 2024, Lehi, Utah
Boostly, an innovative marketing platform for restaurants, has raised $5.6 million in seed funding led by Trestle Partners (New York and Palm Beach), with participation from Relish Works (Chicago), Singularity Capital (Tucson), and Y Combinator (Mountain View). Lead investor, Trestle Partners, is an emerging growth manager targeting capital efficient software businesses that generate meaningful ROI for their customers. Trestle partners with pre-Series A enterprise software founders who prioritize responsible growth and the preservation of exit opportunities.
“We are incredibly excited about our partnership with Boostly,” said Thomas Babcock, Founder and Partner at Trestle Partners, with offices in New York and Palm Beach, Florida. “We were immediately drawn to the company as we discovered how meaningfully the platform increased revenue and saved restaurant owners valuable time. Boostly is an easy to use, highly ROI-generative software platform serving a real need in the restaurant industry. Additionally, each customer we spoke to raved about the founders, team, and customer service.”
Boostly will use the $5.6 million seed investment to accelerate the company's outreach efforts to restaurants to help them leverage customer data to drive orders and revenue with minimal effort. With the new funding, Boostly plans to expand its team, enhance its platform, and increase its market presence.
To date, Boostly has facilitated over $50 million in restaurant sales since inception, demonstrating the platform's effectiveness in generating substantial returns and revenue acceleration for its clients.
Boostly says its automated platform has enabled thousands of restaurants across North America to build a CRM for both online and offline customers, utilizing SMS marketing to effectively engage customers. Boostly addresses the challenge of building a large SMS subscriber base quickly by working with all technology sources used by restaurants to gather relevant insights and deliver uniquely engaging messages. The company says its messages achieve 10x greater engagement rates compared to traditional SMS marketing systems.
One Boostly customer, Jaime McMahon, owner of Hickory Station Pizzeria, a community-focused pizzeria in Bel Air, Maryland, put it this way: “My shop has been open for 23 years. We’re an established business and I honestly thought all the fast growth was over. I started with Boostly in April. For April and May we were up 20% over April and May last year. For the first week in June we’re up almost 33%. I’m generating over $20,000 in additional sales per month! Absolutely the best marketing I’ve ever done.”
In January of 2018, Shane Murphy and his co-founder, Mikey Murphy (no relation) launched a basic online ordering system with built in marketing and feedback tools in order to help restaurants put their customer data to work to drive more sales.
Shane had previously led sales at Jolt, a restaurant operations software company.
"Throughout the year we noticed that restaurants were purchasing our sub-par online ordering system just to get access to the marketing tools," explained Shane Murphy, Boostly's CEO. "We realized that we didn't need to be the ordering platform in order to leverage the data that was flowing across the restaurant's tech stack. In 2019 we pivoted to become an SMS marketing & feedback system for restaurants."
Together, Shane and Mikey launched a business catering marketplace which they sold to an online ordering company for the restaurant industry.
Shane Murphy (CEO) and Mikey Murphy (CTO) have bootstrapped Boostly from its inception in 2018 until June 2022 when they were accepted as part of Y Combinator's batch S22. The company currently has 40 employees and holds an office at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi. In June of this year Shane Murphy was voted by other Utah entrepreneurs as a Founder 100 Awardee.
"Restaurant owners often lack the time and marketing resources needed to reach consumers in a way that drives more orders and increases sales," said Shane Murphy. "We've created a revenue-generating engine that requires minimal effort from the restaurant and is highly engaging for consumers. This investment will help us develop new, novel methods of customer engagement and provide more opportunities for restaurants to thrive in today's increasingly competitive market."
For information about Boostly and its services visit boostly.com.