Craftable, a Farmers Branch-based hospitality industry SaaS platform, announced it has partnered with Southlake-based private equity firm Gauge Capital to provide growth funding and capitalize on industry opportunities.

Samuel Zats

Craftable said the strategic investment further enhances its position at the forefront of cutting-edge technology shaping the hospitality industry. Financial details were not disclosed.

“We’re excited to partner with Gauge for the next chapter of Craftable’s growth,” Craftable co-founder and CEO Samuel Zats said in a statement. “We look forward to leveraging the resources and support from an investment partner with significant enterprise software expertise while maintaining our relentless focus on the customer experience that has always been at the core of Craftable’s success.”

“Gauge’s growth investment in the business and aligned focus on supporting our customers will help us to accelerate our product innovation, execute our sales strategy and further build our impact in the market,” Zats added.

Easy-to-use tools based on real-time data

Craftable—which has 70 employees—said its innovative tech solutions equip restaurant, bar, hotel, and hospitality operators with intuitive and easy-to-use tools that can help them make strategic decisions based on real-time data to drive sales and reduce costs.

The company’s hospitality management SaaS platform allows for seamless back-of-house automation and management.

Craftable said that by providing operators with procurement, inventory tracking, recipe cost management, accounts payable automation, scheduling, and analytics solutions, they can boost revenue while successfully lowering pour costs by 3-5% and food costs by 2-3%.

Craftable reports having 50,000-plus monthly active users, with more onboarding daily. The company said it serves thousands of hospitality industry operators and partners with some of the most prominent names in hospitality.

Zats founded Craftable after seeing managers take notes on pen & paper

According to Craftable, Zats founded the startup in 2014 after watching his friends in restaurant management struggle to keep up with their businesses “by constantly taking important notes on pen and paper—including inventory, suppliers, recipe costing, accounting and labor.”

Zats contacted hospitality industry members to see how they approached management and operations challenges, and found they were all facing the same issues: “Each week, operators spent hours pouring over spreadsheets, running and comparing the numbers, and ultimately struggling to make the process accurate, timely, and efficient,” the company said.

By 2015, Craftable’s platform had expanded to include bar management, restaurant management, and reporting.

Craftable has recently been featured in Yahoo! Finance, Food and Beverage Magazine and the Restaurant Rockstars podcast.

‘A highly scalable technology platform’—and new board members

“Craftable has a distinguished reputation in the hospitality sector, enterprise-grade capabilities, and a highly scalable technology platform,” Tom McKelvey, co-founder and managing partner at Gauge Capital, said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the Craftable team to realize our shared vision for the future of hospitality innovation.”

As part of the investment, Tom McKelvey, Garrett Fair, and Sam Yang from Gauge Capital have joined Craftable’s board of directors, the company said. TI Partners served as financial adviser on the transaction.

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