Bite Ninja scoops up pre-seed funding to reimagine restaurant working environments

Published August 11, 2021

Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis.

Needing to fill a shift one Friday night, Clem decided to prop his laptop in the drive-thru lane of one of his restaurants and took orders from home by remoting into the system. No one noticed that he wasn’t actually taking orders from the kitchen itself. Thus came the idea for Bite Ninja, a remote hiring technology platform for restaurants.

Clem connected with Orin Wilson to start the company in 2020 and worked for a year on the technology before launching it in March. Today, the company announced $675,000 in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.

With many restaurants unable to find workers as a result of the global pandemic, Clem and Wilson wanted to build a technology that would enable restaurants to go back to normal operating hours, or even reopen their stores. At the same time, the workers, or “Ninjas” as they are referred to, can work the drive-thru or counter for a lunch or dinner rush shift from home, but appear on-screen to customers via menu boards, Wilson said.

Bite Ninja drive-thru. Image Credits: Bite Ninja

“When a restaurant is slammed, you need an army of people to work the rush, but it is not reasonable to ask them to get in their uniform and get in their cars, last-minute, to clock in for just an hour or two,” he added. “They have control of their schedule and can pick the right shift for them. It is so popular that we typically have five to 10 people bidding on each shift.”

Bite Ninja is providing a better experience and reaches potential workers that would not necessarily have an interest in performing fast food work. Many of the 3,000 Ninjas already working with the company are stay-at-home moms and retirees with customer service experience, but who can’t physically come into a store, Clem said. In addition, the company is working with the Nurse-Family Partnership to help women get back into the workforce.

The company initially ran three pilot programs and has expanded services to curbside and front cashier stations. The funding will enable Bite Ninja to scale initiatives, hire additional software engineers and prepare for a rollout at national food chains.

Since launching earlier this year, Bite Ninja is already being used in a few thousand stores.

Manuel Gonzalez, partner at AgFunder, said restaurants are a big part of entrepreneurship, but the pandemic forced more than 110,000 of them out of business.

“Bite Ninja’s solution is one that decreases costs to restaurant owners, but increases the income of the worker,” he said. “It also helps entrepreneurs and the community because restaurants are important for economic, cultural, community and social points of view.”

Wall Street needs to relax, as startups show remote work is here to stay

VCs have growing appetite for ‘AgriFood’

Published March 7, 2019

Venture investors are pouring billions of dollars into feeding their hunger for food and agriculture startups. Whether that trend line is due to enthusiasm for the sector or just broader heavy investing in the VC space is much less clear.

According to a recent report published by AgFunder – a VC and investing marketplace focused on the agriculture and food sectors – the “AgriFood” space is booming. Using data from Crunchbase and several other data partners, the organization published its “2018 AgriFood Tech Investing Report” this morning, finding that investment in AgriFood companies increased 43% year-over-year, reaching $16.9 billion in 2018.

AgFunder classifies AgriFood tech as “the small but growing segment of the startup and venture capital universe that’s aiming to improve or disrupt the global food and agriculture industry.” Their definition is intentionally broad, encompassing everything from crop and livestock biotech, property management systems, and payments, to biomaterials and meat alternatives, all the way up to tech platforms for restaurants, grocers, deliveries and at-home cooks.

While some of the AgriFood tech categories – such as delivery or restaurant software – have long been popular destinations for venture capital, we’re now seeing a more diverse array of startups innovating across the entire food supply chain. According to the report, expansion in AgriFood is fairly consistent across upstream (agricultural and farming) subsectors to downstream (more consumer-facing) subsectors, with each group growing roughly 44% and 42% year-over-year respectively.

The data also shows growth occurring across almost all deal stages. AgriFood saw huge increases in the average deal size and total investment for late-stage companies in particular, as venture-backed startups have grown to global scale. And penetrating and attracting capital from international markets seems more feasible than ever. AgriFood investing, which traditionally has been largely US-centric, is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, with more than half of total funding – and some of the largest rounds – now coming from companies and investors outside the US.