Crunchtime

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Founder: Bill Bellissimo
Founding: 1995
Mission: Empower restaurant brands to operate every location like their best location
Employees: 350 & ~30% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Late Stage Growth & undisclosed amount raised
Investors: Battery Ventures
Key Customers: Burger King, Chipotle, Dunkin, Five Guys, Jersey Mike’s, McDonalds, P.F. Chang’ and many more
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): $500M+ (assuming average software revenue multiple on $100M+ ARR)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Crunchtime is a vertical software company that serves multi-unit restaurant brands, helping them deliver industry leading operational excellence in every location. From inventory to labor management to scheduling to operations, Crunchtime has been helping the restaurant industry stay tasty for almost three decades.

Founded in 1995 by Bill Bellissimo, he worked in restaurants from an early age. After a career on Wall Street, he returned to the space to become the President of a regional restaurant chain (src). While working as a restaurant executive, the ingredients for Crunchtime were procured..then deployed. The business didn’t raise any announced outside capital for 20 years until Battery Ventures came calling in 2015. Bill led the company as CEO for 27 years too before handing the reins to John Raguin, former Co-Founder & President of Guidewire, to help lead them through their next phase of growth in 2023.

The restaurant industry drives $1.1T of total sales per year (src). Dining out has become more popular aided by changing cultural trends and food delivery platforms. As a result, the restaurant management software market is $5B+ growing to $13B+ by the end of the decade (src). Whether for community or unique experiences, this secular trend of eating outside our homes looks intact.

Crunchtime is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these tailwinds, helping multi-unit restaurants manage their inventory, labor & scheduling, learning & development, and operations execution. They support 500+ brands across 125,000+ locations in 100+ countries. In summary, they’re delivering some serious scale.

Inventory Management is their flagship product line and helps their customers optimize inventory levels in order to better control costs and utilize data for better reporting. Their software helps with inventory counts and reviews as well as ordering & reconciliation. It even supports AI-powered sales forecasts, integrating with partner POS and accounting systems. 

Powered by Operational Intelligence, Crunchtime helps surface operations data to help restaurants drive better strategic decisions. Restaurants can use Labor & Scheduling to create optimized schedules and more accurately forecast labor needs. More recently, they acquired DiscoverLink (a learning/training platform) in 2021 and Zenput (task management, food safety, field audits) in 2022 to help round out their platform suite.

Today Crunchtime supports 80% of the top 50 restaurant brands in the U.S. and more than one-third of the top 500. As a numerical reflection of that progress, they have surpassed $100M+ ARR as of February 2024 and almost 50% of Crunchtime’s customers are multi-product (src). 

Notable new customers and those who expanded their use cases in 2023 include the likes of Bowlero, Jersey Mike’s, The Cheesecake Factory, Jimmy John’s, Dave & Buster’s, Miller’s Ale House, Cafe Rio Mexican Grill, and Ruby Tuesday. Ok, I’m hungry!

Crunchtime continues to hire here in Boston and around the world on their path up the mountain. Here’s to many more meals powered by Crunchtime!

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Crunchtime team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the big upcoming milestones for Crunchtime headed into 2025?
  • What features are restaurants asking about the most with the rollout of AI?
  • What has changed in the restaurant industry after the pandemic?
  • What is the long term vision for the company?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Crunchtime you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more restaurants into the AI & digital age. All hungry consumers applaud your efforts. I’m one of them. See you around town!

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