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UPDATE: Parrot Software has $2.1 million to grow its restaurant point-of-sale and management service in Mexico
The two founders of Parrot Software, Roberto Cebrián and David Villarreal, first met in high school in Monterrey, Mexico. In the 11 years since, both have pursued successful careers in the tech industry and became family (they’re brothers-in-law).
Now, they’re starting a new business together leveraging Cebrián’s experience running a point-of-sale company and Villarreal’s time working first at Uber and then at the high-growth scooter and bike rental startup, Grin.
Cebrían’s experience founding the point-of-sale company S3 Software laid the foundation for Parrot Software, and its point-of-sale service to manage restaurant operations.
“Roberto has been in the industry for the past six or seven years,” said Villarreal. “And he was telling me that no one has been serving [restaurants] properly… Roberto pitched me the idea and I got super involved and decided to start the company.”
Parrot Software co-founders Roberto Cebrían and David Villarreal. Image Credit: Parrot Software
Like Toast in the U.S., Parrot manages payments, including online and payments and real-time ordering, along with integrations into services that can manage the back-end operations of a restaurant too, according to Villarreal. Those services include things like delivery software, accounting and loyalty systems.
The company is already live in more than 500 restaurants in Mexico and is used by chains including Cinnabon, Dairy Queen, Grupo Costeño and Grupo Pangea.
Based in Monterrey, Mexico, the company has managed to attract a slew of high-profile North American investors, including Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures, Foundation Capital, Superhuman angel fund and Ed Baker, a product lead at Uber. Together they’ve poured $2.1 million into the young company.
Since its launch, Parrot has managed to land contracts in 10 cities, with the largest presence in Northeastern Mexico, around Monterrey, said Villarreal.
The market for restaurant management software is large and growing. It’s a big category that’s expected to reach $6.94 billion in sales worldwide by 2025, according to a report from Grand View Research.
Investors in the U.S. market certainly believe in the potential opportunity for a business like Toast. That company has raised nearly $1 billion in funding from firms like Bessemer Venture Partners, the private equity firm TPG and Tiger Global Management.
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This robot can build your IKEA furniture
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who hate building IKEA furniture and madmen. Now, thanks to IkeaBot, the madmen can be replaced.
IkeaBot is a project built at Control Robotics Intelligence (CRI) group at NTU in Singapore. The team began by teaching robots to insert pins and manipulate IKEA parts, then, slowly, they began to figure out how to pit the robots against the furniture. The results, if you’ve ever fought with someone trying to put together a Billy, are heartening.
From Spectrum:
The assembly process from CRI is not quite that autonomous; “although all the steps were automatically planned and controlled, their sequence was hard-coded through a considerable engineering effort.” The researchers mention that they can “envision such a sequence being automatically determined from the assembly manual, through natural-language interaction with a human supervisor or, ultimately, from an image of the chair,” although we feel like they should have a chat with Ross Knepper, whose IkeaBot seemed to do just fine without any of that stuff.
In other words the robots are semi-autonomous but never get frustrated and can use basic heuristics to figure out next steps. The robots can now essentially assemble chairs in about 20 minutes, a feat that I doubt many of us can emulate. You can watch the finished dance here, in all its robotic glory.
The best part? Even robots get frustrated and fling parts around:
I, for one, welcome our IKEA chair manufacturing robotic overlords.
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Flexport CEO expresses some remorse in taking cash from Peter Thiel
Remember when we found out billionaire investor Peter Thiel is in support of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump? At TechCrunch Shanghai 2016, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen, who has received significant funding from Thiel, candidly spoke about his discomfort around Thiel’s backing of Trump. “I don’t know what’s going on there,” Petersen told me on stage… Read More
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