Manila-based restaurant reservation app BigDish has acquired local food and travel discovery platform looloo for an undisclosed amount, according to a BusinessNews.ph report.
The acquisition comes less than a month after BigDish went public on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and raised £1.8 million (US$2.3 million) from its IPO.
Founded in 2012, looloo is one of the leading place discovery and review apps in the Philippines.
looloo allows users to explore and discover restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions and other places of interest all over the Philippines through crowd-sourced reviews.
It currently has over 330,000 reviews covering over 36,000 places in the Philippines, and has become the go-to source for hundreds of thousands of Filipinos looking to discover something new around the country or find an old favorite.
With markets in United Kingdom, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, BigDish is a growing food tech startup that helps restaurants maximize their revenue during off-peak hours while providing diners big discounts.
As the restaurant industry continues to grow rapidly in the Philippines, looloo’s popular restaurant discovery feature is an ideal match with BigDish’s focus on restaurant yield management.
The looloo team will be joining BigDish and will be operating independently with its own brand under the BigDish ownership.
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“We’re extremely excited about the acquisition. We’re looking forward to expanding the looloo team and working alongside BigDish to grow looloo’s reach and improve our products,” said Roegan Taron, Managing Director of looloo.
BigDish, Founded in April 2013, is a yield management platform for the restaurant industry. The platform allows restaurants to boost their sales by offering a variable pricing strategy dependent on the time of day that a restaurant reservation is made for. – BusinessNewsAsia.com