You know what’s not fun? Ordering takeout from your favorite restaurant over the phone — actually planning ahead instead of just showing up — only to wait in line like a schlub once you get there to pick up your order and pay. If you’re anything like me, this has happened enough times that you’ve thought about starting a Facebook support group, or at least made a strongly-worded mental note of it. Well, luckily OrderAhead feels your pain.
The Y Combinator grad offers a free app (for the iPhone) that allows anyone and everyone to quickly order takeout from local merchants. Connect your credit card, order the food you want to shovel into your mouth at a later point, then pick up the food with your name and phone number — free of charge.
At present, OrderAhead’s network focuses on restaurants (mostly of the takeout variety), but in the future, the startup is thinking big: It wants to be the easiest way to order anything from local merchants via your phone. Sound like a pipe dream? Well, OrderAhead has a few investors who would beg to differ.
Up until now, the startup has largely flown under the radar, eschewing press for some good, old-fashioned heads-down company-building. But, today, along with officially making its presence known, OrderAhead is officially revealing that it raised $2.3 million in seed funding earlier this year from a bevy of recognizable names, including Facebook Co-founder Adam D’Angelo, Matrix Partners, Menlo Ventures, Ignition Partners, Y Combinator and YC partners (Harj Taggar, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Paul Buchheit, Geoff Ralston), CrunchFund, SV Angel, Eric Schmidt (via Innovation Endavors) and, last but not least, Bay Area crepe chain, Crepevine.
