OMERS makes its largest Canadian tech investment ever in TouchBistro

On September 18, 2019, OMERS Growth Equity (OMERS) announced an investment of $100 million in TouchBistro Inc. (TouchBistro), a Toronto-based restaurant point of sale system, marking the pension funds’s largest Canadian tech investment to date.

The investment is part of a $158 million series E financing round, which includes new investors Barclays, BMO Capital and RBC Ventures, as well as existing investors JP Morgan Chase, Napier Park Financial Partners, Recruit Holdings Co, Ltd. BDC IT Venture Fund, Relay Ventures and Kensington Capital Partners. The financing comes after OMERS and JP Morgan Chase invested $72 million in TouchBistro just last year.

OMERS’ investments in TouchBistro is on trend with the pension fund’s relatively new initiation of a growth equity division, purposed to invest in growth-stage companies. As part of the deal with TouchBistro, OMERS Ventures’s Managing Partner Damian Steel will join TouchBistro’s board of directors.

TouchBistro began operating less than a decade ago, originally providing software for restaurant servers to take and transmit tableside orders on iPads and seamlessly split bills for restaurant guests. The company now provides kitchen-management displays systems for cooks and reporting and analytics software for managers, and services more than 16,000 restaurants in over 100 countries.

With the proceeds of the recent financing round, TouchBistro plans to double the size of its team over the next year and expand its software service portfolio by delving into scheduling, payment solutions, payroll management, inventory management, online ordering and reservations. TouchBistro’s co-founder and CEO Alex Barrotti projects that the company will generate nearly $50-million in revenue this year and go public by early 2021.

Author: Jordyn Benattar, 2019/2020 Articling Student-at-law