The Future of Ordering Experiences — Why We Funded Noble

Meet the team that’s revolutionizing customer experience for service venues.

DRF is excited to announce our latest investment in Noble, the future of in-venue ordering experiences.

At the heart of Noble’s solution is deep inefficiency at current venues.

Bartenders spend 50% of their time processing payments. At certain venues — what Noble calls purposeful venues — guests are only there for a limited period of time, such as concerts, comedy shows and sports events. Typically, lines form at the bar during the event for drinks. Every minute spent processing payments is time spent not making drinks. This creates a lousy guest experience and venues lose out on revenue from people who don’t want to wait in line.

The Noble mobile application allows guests to order food or drinks in-venue without having to wait in line, and either pickup their order or have it delivered.

For venues, Noble offers the “Noble Kit” — an iPad and receipt printer designed to fit seamlessly into the workflow of bartenders.

Through its seamless ordering and bartender workflow experience, Noble has already dramatically improved efficiency and revenues for their customers. In a case study with Wang Theatre, Noble has already added about 5% to bar revenue each night, and customers on average spend 50% more when using the Noble app then without.

Whether you’re catching a game at your favorite sports bar and can’t find your server, or skipping the lines for the intermission rush at the theater, Noble is there to keep you in the moment.

Why DRF Invested

With a previous investment in the space — Bevspot, one of the leading bar inventory solutions on the market— we’ve seen a lot of interesting problems and inefficiencies in service businesses.

What led to our investment in Noble were several key, exciting fundamentals we found in the company:

1. Timing: Venues have been experiencing several waves of software innovation and deployment in recent years. The first wave of software for venues was point-of-sale solutions. This was followed by a wave of solutions aimed at tracking and optimizing inventory. Today, venues and employees are comfortable with software as a crucial part of their business process. The only missing piece in the bar software stack is a customer-facing solution for ordering, and with the rise of mobile payments as a norm, the time is right for Noble to fill that gap.
2. Strong, balanced Team: The Noble team is uniquely placed to solve this problem. COO Matt Draper brings a history of digital transformation and customer experience design from his time at MRM/McCann. CDO Shane De Lumeau brings a strong background in design from Amazon and Comcast to the team. CTO Drew Pomerleau brings experience form Paypal and Starry in building and scaling applications. Finally, CEO Varun Pathak complements the team’s strengths with a wealth of experience in the entertainment space from his previous venture Linejump, and strong business acumen from his time at Intuit.
3. Deep Customer Love: One of the strongest ways to learn about a company is by talking to its customers. When chatting with Noble’s customers, we saw incredible passion and excitement for the product. For example, Wang Theatre built an entirely separate Noble bar in its venue on the first floor, and is building another one on the second floor. Venues showed excitement about the Noble platform and the future it offered, but even more-so, Noble’s initial customers are working closely with the team by pulling product out of the company and requesting new functionality that further embeds the product into their core business processes.
4. Compelling Go-to-Market Model: Previous competitors have struggled with significant go-to-market and user acquisition challenges in the space. By engaging directly with large concessionary companies and enterprise entertainment companies, Noble is able to deploy their product across thousands of venues quickly — previously, competitors have had to pursue a painful door-to-door sales model. On top of this, Noble’s initial customers have not asked for a white label solution and have taken on the cost of marketing Noble to their guests, helping build the Noble network.

Noble’s long-term vision is to offer insights on consumer habits and consumption to the entire alcohol supply-chain. Much of this supply-chain operates in the “dark,” lacking detailed information broken down by demographics and geography to inform their production and purchasing decisions. As Noble scales, its dataset will become a rich source of insight for the entire industry. Noble can tell venues what they sold each night, but are focused on telling their customers who bought their products and why.

Learn more about Noble and get a text to download the app by visiting their website here or their blog here.

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