Queenstown-based global business First Table’s getting ready to grow.
The company, founded by Mat Weir in 2014, today starts a capital raise, via Snowball Effect, a New Zealand-based online investment marketplace, enabling Kiwi companies to offer shares to the public.
Weir’s hoping to raise between $2 million and $4m, which will be used to consolidate the current offering, and expand into new markets.
The first cab off the rank will be Melbourne, where the business set up pre-Covid, but hadn’t properly launched, followed by Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield, in the UK.
Along with reinvigorating the other markets they’re already in — which include NZ, Ireland, Bali and Canada — the team’s also rolling out new products.
On Wednesday, it launched a nationwide loyalty programme, Frequent Foodies, where First Table diners earn ‘status points’, which can then be used to unlock benefits like discounted bookings and gift vouchers, and jumping the queue to book a table the day before anyone else.
And, on February 15, ‘Regular Table’ will launch.
It’s believed to be the world’s first restaurant booking platform, using real-time availability, enabling diners to find available tables at restaurants, no matter the time, number of people, or reservation system used by the restaurant.
Regular Table users will also accumulate Frequent Foodie points.
‘‘The big thing is, we’ve been doing First Table for a long time, but we’re at a key point in time where we’ve got these new products coming out, so that changes the dynamics of the model,’’ Weir says.
‘‘We’ve got a lot to offer, so the capital raise allows us to get all of that out a lot quicker.’’
He’s particularly excited about launching Regular Table, which he expects is going to attract a lot of restaurants due to the value-add.
‘‘Restaurant bookings, especially in NZ, are really fragmented.
‘‘There’s no one place that you can go to find availability across multiple restaurants at once.
‘‘You’ve basically got to Google, ‘Queenstown restaurants’, and then go through them, one by one, checking availability.
‘‘That’s a problem that’s quite relevant to Queenstown, because it is tough to get a table at the moment, so that’s something we can solve, and that’s because we integrate into seven different reservation systems.’’
