See the original story in Japanese. Japanese mobile telco NTT DoCoMo (TSE:9437) has secured a capital and business tie-up with Toreta, the Japanese startup offering a reservation and customer management platform for restaurants under the same name. The telco invested 3 billion yen ($27.2 million US) in the startup this time around, which brings the latter’s total amount raised to date to 6.13 billion yen ($55.5 million US). Through this deal, NTT DoCoMo has secured a 39.7% stake in Toreta by the $27.2 million cash injection as well as buying shares from existing investors for an undisclosed sum. By launching a new service allowing restaurants to take reservations and orders as well as receiving payments in mid-2019, the two companies will promote the telco’s mobile payments and rewards redemption service. Prior to this investment, the telco’s VC arm participated in a $12 million investment in the startup back in September of 2016. Toreta was launched in December of 2013 by Hitoshi Nakamura who has founded multiple food related online businesses. Having successfully acquired almost 1,000 restaurants as users within six months since the launch, the company’s user base hit 12,000 as of November of this year. CEO Nakamura has been…
Japanese mobile telco NTT DoCoMo (TSE:9437) has secured a capital and business tie-up with Toreta, the Japanese startup offering a reservation and customer management platform for restaurants under the same name.
The telco invested 3 billion yen ($27.2 million US) in the startup this time around, which brings the latter’s total amount raised to date to 6.13 billion yen ($55.5 million US). Through this deal, NTT DoCoMo has secured a 39.7% stake in Toreta by the $27.2 million cash injection as well as buying shares from existing investors for an undisclosed sum.
By launching a new service allowing restaurants to take reservations and orders as well as receiving payments in mid-2019, the two companies will promote the telco’s mobile payments and rewards redemption service. Prior to this investment, the telco’s VC arm participated in a $12 million investment in the startup back in September of 2016.
Toreta was launched in December of 2013 by Hitoshi Nakamura who has founded multiple food related online businesses. Having successfully acquired almost 1,000 restaurants as users within six months since the launch, the company’s user base hit 12,000 as of November of this year. CEO Nakamura has been aggressively promoting digitalizing food businesses through launching a conference called Foodit Tokyo.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Toreta, the company offering a reservation and customer management platform for restaurants under the same name, announced on Friday that it has secured 1.2 billion yen (about $12 million) in the latest round. This round was led by Eight Roads Ventures Japan with participation from NTT Docomo Ventures and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital as well as four existing shareholders: Femto Growth Capital, WiL (World Innovation Lab), iStyle Capital (now known as iSGS Investment Works), and Salesforce Ventures. Details of the shareholding ratios and payment date have not been disclosed. In accordance with this, David Milstein, Head of Eight Roads Ventures Japan, will join the board as an external director. Since launching the service in December of 2013, Toreta has seen a steady increase in the number of acquired restaurants, and as of September 2016 it has been introduced in some 7000 stores. Additionally, it is possible for participating businesses to access services from detailed table and seat management to online reservations for their restaurants. Merely by accumulating more users, Toreta has found additional business potential. The company aims to use the funds secured this round to enhance their development system and to…
Tokyo-based Toreta, the company offering a reservation and customer management platform for restaurants under the same name, announced on Friday that it has secured 1.2 billion yen (about $12 million) in the latest round. This round was led by Eight Roads Ventures Japan with participation from NTT Docomo Ventures and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital as well as four existing shareholders: Femto Growth Capital, WiL (World Innovation Lab), iStyle Capital (now known as iSGS Investment Works), and Salesforce Ventures. Details of the shareholding ratios and payment date have not been disclosed.
In accordance with this, David Milstein, Head of Eight Roads Ventures Japan, will join the board as an external director.
Since launching the service in December of 2013, Toreta has seen a steady increase in the number of acquired restaurants, and as of September 2016 it has been introduced in some 7000 stores. Additionally, it is possible for participating businesses to access services from detailed table and seat management to online reservations for their restaurants. Merely by accumulating more users, Toreta has found additional business potential.
The company aims to use the funds secured this round to enhance their development system and to strengthen their sales and support marketing system.
To get down to it, from their founding period (no, even before that) I’ve kept an eye on Toreta as a favored reservation and customer database management service and now they have managed to fundraise over 1 billion yen ($10 million) in funding. With rumors floating about of an IPO within the next few years, perhaps their next large funding will come with the announcement of this.
Disclosure: A member of the author’s family has in the past had a contractual business relationship with Toreta.
While they continue to steadily acquire new stores, I was curious about their growth strategy for the future. With that in mind, I approached the company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura with a few key points.
First, what measures do they have to expand sales? With regards to the introduction speed of reservation and customer database management services Nakamura mentioned it’s proportional to sales force. Aside from this, they can increase numbers by offering additional services with the goal being to upsell. This is straightforward.
But what about the online reservation feature? One of the strong points of Toreta’s model is when restaurants receive a reservation (having until now used a paper ledger to record it) they are now able to to manage the status of their seating digitally. Consequently, it becomes possible to efficiently provide tables and seats to customers, ultimately contributing to the sales of these restaurants.
Recently, Nakamura said close to 20 percent of stores using their service support online reservations, and confided that this is also a growing trend.
We originally developed our service to solve the problem of managing numerous reservations for extremely busy restaurants, and we’ve acquired many contracts with ‘thriving businesses’ concentrating on reservations.
Usability, functionality, support, in every aspect our service have been optimized for these ‘thriving businesses.’ These businesses use Toreta with remarkable results, and from there news of us spreads by word of mouth. I believe our current expansion is a result of this.
On the other hand, restaurants typically require to use Gurunavi, Tabelog, Retty and other online restaurant review sites as a gateway to bring customers to their online reservation. Toreta is the only “reception” system connected to the restaurant side of seat inventory management, and for restaurants to accept customers it is essential to make use of such media sites.
With that, a question: I tried asking about the possibility of Toreta acquiring these types of media sites. First and foremost, Toreta can be thought of as a platform to assist restaurants from attracting customers to improving management. Regardless of the gourmet media sites, there exists a wide variety of service providers in the food-related IT industry, and acquisition can definitely be considered a stepping stone for private companies.
As a means for the expansion of our business, certainly I think acquisition is one of the choices. Not only reservations, but other business areas as well; not only Japan, but abroad as well. If there are partners that can share in our ideals from a variety of angles, we’d like to aggressively continue to increase such relationships.
He chose his words carefully while answering, but through Nakamura’s expressions I could feel just a hint of satisfaction.
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Toreta, the startup that provides the reservation management system for restaurants, announced today it has raised 200 million yen (about $2 million) from Silicon Valley-based investment company WiL (World Innovation Lab). See also: Toreta: A new reservation management app for restaurants in Japan Coinciding with this announcement, the company also unveiled that Kengo Yoshida, the former executive at Japanese internet giant GMO Pepabo, will join the board of management on July 1st. They will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing forces. Since its launch in December, the company has acquired more than 1,000 restaurants as users. The service’s monthly charge is 9,000 yen (about $90) a restaurant, so its easy to figure out how much money they are making every month. According to the company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura, about 500,000 restaurants annually generate $226 billion in the Japanese restaurant industry. He said that the company will target the top 20% of restaurants in Japan, which will bring in revenue of about $98 million. But I think their investors will not be satisfied with this figure. How do they evolve the restaurant business? Many restaurants that use a conventional online reservation…
From the left: COO Kengo Yoshida, CEO Hitoshi Nakamura
Tokyo-based Toreta, the startup that provides the reservation management system for restaurants, announced today it has raised 200 million yen (about $2 million) from Silicon Valley-based investment company WiL (World Innovation Lab).
Coinciding with this announcement, the company also unveiled that Kengo Yoshida, the former executive at Japanese internet giant GMO Pepabo, will join the board of management on July 1st. They will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing forces.
Since its launch in December, the company has acquired more than 1,000 restaurants as users. The service’s monthly charge is 9,000 yen (about $90) a restaurant, so its easy to figure out how much money they are making every month.
According to the company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura, about 500,000 restaurants annually generate $226 billion in the Japanese restaurant industry. He said that the company will target the top 20% of restaurants in Japan, which will bring in revenue of about $98 million. But I think their investors will not be satisfied with this figure.
How do they evolve the restaurant business?
Many restaurants that use a conventional online reservation platform, like OpenTable, check a reservation book and manually input reservations to the online system. This process is time-consuming and can cause booking errors.
However, Toreta can check the status of table availability of participating restaurants using the platform and help them fill their vacancies by sending them customers in an efficient way. Nakamura explained:
We can manage the table availability of restaurants as our inventory using the system. In this way, we are more likely to receive reservations through foodie websites and send them to the restaurants. We are planning to develop an API to integrate with marketing websites (such as Tabelog or Gurunavi).
Because many competitors are targeting this market, Nakamura understands that the company will have to acquire the top spot within a couple of years to survive. The company has been steadily acquiring users, but they invited Yoshida to join the team to strengthen their online marketing strategy. Yoshida told us how he will proceed:
Our revenue is still dependent on the efforts of our sales representatives. But we will explore what to do for our online marketing from now. But people working in the restaurant industry can be very digitally challenged. So we may need to make offline efforts as well.
It will be interesting to see how the company will evolve the restaurant business with the digital technology.
Disclosure: The author’s wife has a business relationship with Toreta.
See the original article in Japanese Hitoshi Nakamura, the CEO of Toreta Inc., has released a new app for the food service industry called Toreta. Nakamura is best known as the founder FrogApps, which operates Japanese food photos sharing app, Mill. Our readers may recall that we previously spoke with Nakamura about his decision of stepping down as the CEO of FrogApps. And now, his new endeavor has been revealed [1]. Toreta is an iPad app that lets restaurants easily manage their customers’ reservations. It’s somewhat unique in that it targets restaurants as its users, and not customers. Reservation data is managed on the cloud, with features such as voice-recoding, hand-written notes, and the ability to send confirmation messages via SMS. You can get an the idea of how the service works in the introduction video above. The biggest advantage to using the app is that restaurants can shorten the time required to take and manage reservations. Nakamura further explains: Mill was a service for end users, but Toreta was designed and developed as a B2B service. As I have been in the restaurant busness, I have seen a lot of inefficiency and issues. With these issues in mind, the…
Hitoshi Nakamura, the CEO of Toreta Inc., has released a new app for the food service industry called Toreta. Nakamura is best known as the founder FrogApps, which operates Japanese food photos sharing app, Mill. Our readers may recall that we previously spoke with Nakamura about his decision of stepping down as the CEO of FrogApps. And now, his new endeavor has been revealed [1].
Toreta is an iPad app that lets restaurants easily manage their customers’ reservations. It’s somewhat unique in that it targets restaurants as its users, and not customers. Reservation data is managed on the cloud, with features such as voice-recoding, hand-written notes, and the ability to send confirmation messages via SMS. You can get an the idea of how the service works in the introduction video above.
The biggest advantage to using the app is that restaurants can shorten the time required to take and manage reservations. Nakamura further explains:
Mill was a service for end users, but Toreta was designed and developed as a B2B service. As I have been in the restaurant busness, I have seen a lot of inefficiency and issues. With these issues in mind, the solution I decided to work on is Toreta. A reservation book is one of the most important tools for restaurants when managing critical information. Mishandling the reservations could damage customers’ satisfaction. So Toreta aims to avoid that sort of situations.
Nakamura points out that human errors are inevitable when keeping track in a paper book. And existing solutions for reservation management are not ideal. The initial fee to start using Toreta is free, and users are charged 9,000 yen per month. The first month is free as part of a free trial.
He is also the owner of Butagumi, a restaurant located in Tokyo’s Nishi-Asabu area. ↩
Toreta 
Takeshi Hirano
Junya Mori
