Slice in the PCMag Startup Spotlight

Modern applied science has made it easier than e'er to savor a quality night in. Streaming services offer thousands of movies and Goggle box shows for a low monthly fee. Video games continue to get more advanced with each passing year. The wealth of online food delivery services on the market today makes it convenient to look for your favorite local eateries, choose what food yous want, and take it brought to you, without yous ever having to talk to anyone on the phone.

What you might not realize, however, is that the pizzerias in your community spend a great deal of money to appear on these nutrient delivery applications. Pizza restaurants often see sparse profit margins to begin with, and mom-and-pop pizza shops could be on an unsustainable path by doing business organisation with major players similar Seamless and UberEATS. Now, thanks to online pizza delivery service Slice, pizza delivery is being made more than profitable for local pizzerias nationwide.

PCMag Start-Up Spotlight Series Logo Slice was founded in 2022 past a New Yorker who comes from a family of pizzeria owners. He saw the financial impact these services accept on pizza businesses, and he wanted to create an culling tool that would aid pizzerias compete online while also managing to plow a profit. Then far, Slice has partnered with thousands of pizza restaurants in states across the US, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Nashville, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. Slice has managed to amass a total of $xx million in venture captial (VC) funding. It's hard to brand an impact in a crowded space as online food delivery, but Slice is standing out as a tool that works for pizza restaurants and customers alike.

Company Dossier
Name: Slice
Founded: 2010
Co-founder and CEO: Illir Sela
HQ: New York, NY
What They Do: Online pizza delivery
Business organization Model: $1.95 fee to restaurants per society
Current Condition: Live, and used in more than than 10,000 pizzerias beyond the The states
Next Steps: Continue to scale and grow

Why Information technology Works for Business organisation

If you're the owner of a pizzeria, then y'all might feel every bit though you have no choice merely to do business organization with one of the major online nutrient-commitment platforms. After all, if your competitors offering online ordering and you lot don't, then y'all'll probably lose the sale to the more convenient offering. However, the most popular food-delivery platforms can terminate up costing you lot a fortune in fees, and so it pays to do your homework before cementing any alliances.

According to an Baronial 2022 study from Statista (see chart below), two of the near popular food-delivery platforms that respondents used in the past 12 months were Grubhub (which includes both the Grubhub and Seamless apps) and UberEATS. A report from The Zebra revealed that UberEATS charges a staggering thirty per centum of the order full for its service. Grubhub charges a fee ranging from between 5 and xv percent of every club depending on the restaurant'due south location. That'south quite a bit of money taken from each sale.

Statista: Which of these online providers of food delivery have you used in the past 12 months

Some other thing that threatens the contained pizzeria is the online ordering systems offered by the large fast-food pizza chains such as Domino's and Pizza Hut. These companies have their own sophisticated online ordering systems and offering cheap appurtenances. This creates a unique and severe problem for contained pizza restaurants. On one hand, they are directly competing with the large chains, which oft crush them on cost. On the other hand, they demand to take an online ordering system to compete in the modern globe, so they might think they take no choice but to sacrifice their turn a profit margins and exercise business with the food-delivery platforms.

This is the verbal sort of pain that Slice is trying to ease. It'southward a simple concern model with transactions fabricated through the Slice app toll restaurants just $1.95 regardless of the social club'due south size. You lot can remember of Slice as an e-commerce platform for pizzerias. The app comes with a pizza-edifice module in which customers tin customize toppings and pie sizes before ordering. Slice has designed their app to give pizzerias the online ordering infrastructure they need to stay competitive, while giving them a much more affordable alternative to the mainstream food-delivery platforms.

Inside the Platform

Piece founder and CEO Illir Sela has a rich knowledge of the pizza business. He said that he was inspired by the need he saw in his community. Piece was originally founded under the proper name "MyPizza" and was limited to just a few dozen shops in the Northeast. After a menstruation of rapid growth the company rebranded itself to "Slice" in 2022. Since then, it's been aggressively promoting itself to contained pizza shops.

Illir Sela - Founder and CEO of Slice "I founded the concern to help friends and family unit in the pizza industry to be able to compete in the digital earth. I'm third-generation in the pizza industry. I take a lot of family and friends that own pizza shops, by and large in the New York area, only too every bit far out every bit Arizona," Sela said. "I started off but building websites and online ordering services for these locations. But then I realized that the pizza industry was completely underserved as it pertains to engineering science and online marketing."

One curious departure between Piece and competing apps is that the competition is designed to offer as many food options to users as possible. Open the Grubhub app in an urban area and y'all will see nutrient options ranging from pizza to Indian and everything in betwixt. When nosotros spoke with Sela, he made it very clear that Piece's focus is purely on the neighborhood pizza shop.

"We're very much a solution that's focused on this one vertical. The goal for us is to bulldoze value to the pizza shops and and so ultimately pass that value back to the consumer," Sela said. "Our whole system is built around pizza. Nosotros've designed the app so that, within just two taps, you can identify an order, and we have features like the pizza builder, which makes information technology like shooting fish in a barrel to customize your society."

By focusing on merely one blazon of restaurant, Sela said the company has designed a more streamlined experience than the other companies. "[With the other apps], y'all don't know what you want to consume when yous log on. You want to discover all these different cuisines, and I think the experience is sort of heavy. We wanted to do something dissimilar."

Slice Users and Funding

So far, the more focused approach has worked well for Slice. Piece is currently used past more than 10,000 pizzerias throughout the The states, and Sela told us that this number is quickly growing. On acme of that, as stated earlier, the company has raised a total of $20 million in VC funding. Broken downwards, that amounts to $xv million in funding from VC firm GGV Capital, and the rest coming from VC firms Chief Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners. When asked most the company's hereafter plans, Sela insisted that he and the rest of the Slice team are committed to scaling and growing.

"There's another 40,000-45,000 local pizza shops around the state that are very much underserved. Our goal is to continue to drive forward and bring the solution to all those locations," Sela said. "At the same time, nosotros want to continue to innovate on behalf of these locations, and ultimately, help them convert their businesses from a...phone-centric business to a digital business concern."

Ask the Experts: Startup Advice
Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners Lonne Jaffe, Managing Manager at Insight Venture Partners , said that Slice is wise to focus solely on helping pizzerias.

"I think it's really a really interesting model, and you tin see that in their growth and traction. It's a similar business organisation compages as the food aggregator market place businesses, merely very tuned to the pizza industry, and really focused on minimizing cost and allowing the pizzerias to accuse the same price that they would charge if you lot called them upwards. Pizzerias don't have to raise prices or sacrifice their turn a profit margin with it; it'due south a cost construction that's very manageable," said Jaffe.

"I retrieve the timing is very skillful, and the margin issue is specially salient for pizza because the nature of the product and [its] pricing don't give as much margin room as other kinds of restaurants. By focusing on a large market that'south very homogenous in some means, I think that's a really proficient domain to target restaurants [that] are frustrated with the price indicate of something like Grubhub."