PAR Expands ResTech Platform With Punchh Acquisition

PAR Technology, which provides restaurant software, has acquired Punchh, which works in loyalty and guest solutions, for around $500 million, PAR announced in a Thursday (April 8) press release.

With the acquisition, PAR will become “a unified commerce cloud platform for enterprise restaurants” and will have capabilities for integrated point-of-sale, back office, payment and guest services, per the release.

“Today there is a conflict between restaurants and technology,” PAR Technology Corporation CEO and President Savneet Singh said in the release. “The quantity of new software applications is making it difficult for restaurants to navigate complex integration networks and taking away from focusing on their guests.” Online marketplaces have meanwhile shifted to become intermediaries between restaurants and guests.

“With the Punchh acquisition, we are building a platform that enables restaurants to scale quickly, own their path to innovation, and take back their guest relationship,” he said. “This eliminates the need for juggling disjointed vendors, developing cumbersome point-to-point integrations, and relying on 3rd party dependencies. At the same time, Punchh advances our ability to provide customers with an end-to-end solution, from guest-to-kitchen, through one unified data source.”

He said the combined companies would have generated around $65 million in run-rate ARR at the end of 2020.

“PAR’s point-of-sale and back-office solutions combined with our loyalty and engagement platform give customers an end-to-end solution for top-line growth, profitable guest relationships and operational efficiencies,” said Punchh Co-Founder and President Shyam Rao. “We’re excited to join the PAR team and further our offerings to the hospitality industry.”

Restaurant technology, or ResTech, saw a shifting of times during the pandemic, with people preferring to perform contactless interactions, with 77 percent of respondents to a survey last year saying they thought the addition of contactless pay options would make it more likely for them to spend money at an establishment.

Meanwhile, 19 percent of customers have shifted from dining in restaurants to ordering food off apps since the pandemic began.