Hospitality tech startup ePOS Hybrid has raised almost £750,000 following a successful seed funding campaign.

The funding round, which marks the Edinburgh firm’s second in as many years, saw a total of 329 backers pledge £634,652 through the Crowdcube platform.

Much of the cash support came from repeat supporters and ePOS Hybrid’s existing network of backers. An additional £100,000 was pledged by an angel investor, the firm revealed.

ePOS Hybrid has created a single, intuitive platform which brings together ePOS, payments, digital ordering and operations management to create a centralised management hub for food and drink businesses.

Commenting on the funding, ePOS Hybrid Founder Bhas Kalangi said: “The demand from investors for our second seed round has been overwhelming.

“We’ve attracted a lot of institutional investors who are looking to engage in negotiations despite the round being closed. The money raised will help us pave the way for a period of aggressive hyper-growth across our customer base, our revenues and also across our product innovation.”

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The seed funding round follows a period of rapid growth for ePOS Hybrid, which has spent the first half of 2022 trialling its services in India. The firm hopes to fully launch services in South Asia and capitalise on this huge – and largely untapped – marketplace.

In the last two years, the adoption of the firm’s platform has accelerated rapidly, and is now used in nearly 1,000 locations across the country.

Kalangi added: “We’ve also seen the value of transactions we process increase 20-fold in the UK, from £4.7m to almost £100m. More than 10 million consumers have used our tech to buy a drink or meal.

“With an ever-growing team and the next wave of innovation we have under development, we are perfectly positioned to grow globally, taking a bigger share of a worldwide hospitality and food service market that is worth £4.2 trillion. This investment will power that next chapter.”

Andrew Gibbon, the firm’s Head of Growth, commented: “ePOS Hybrid was able to innovate and thrive throughout the pandemic, despite the hospitality industry grinding to a halt.

“We were able to achieve a very strong product market fit, and deliver the right solutions to our customers at a time where they needed them the most.”

One of the firm’s imminent breakthroughs which caught the eye of investors is the planned launch of a new enterprise version of the system – currently designed for single locations – which focuses on delivering big data and streamlining ops management for large hospitality groups across the UK.

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