Dive Brief:

• 7shifts, a restaurant workforce management platform, secured $80 million in funding led by Softbank on Thursday, with additional participation from existing investors Ten Coves Capital and Enlightened Hospitality Investments. 7shifts' products are currently deployed at more than 27,000 locations across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
• Last spring, 7shifts raised $21.5 million in a round led by Enlightened Hospitality Investments, the growth equity fund affiliated with Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group. The company also closed a $10 million funding round in 2019. 
• Continued investments in 7shifts' platform indicate demand for simplifying workforce management as the restaurant industry continues to grapple with labor shortages. 

Dive Insight:

7shifts is far from the only restaurant tech company experiencing sharp growth and racking up funding as the restaurant industry adds new technologies introduced since the start of the pandemic. Several such companies, including Toast and Olo, have recently gone public. The restaurant management software market is also expected to grow at a compound annual rate of over 14% through 2025, according to Technavio.

7shifts has more than doubled its partner integrations to allow restaurants to connect their technologies and enable operational efficiencies. About 30% of eateries across segments plan to devote more capital to back-of-the-house technology this year, according to the National Restaurant Association's State of the Industry 2022 report.

The company will use its latest round of funding to double the size of its team and build more products to support and expedite restaurant HR process, including onboarding, training and payment.

7shifts' technology also includes scheduling and communication capabilities, which lets employees trade shifts and manage tasks on one platform. CEO Jordan Boesch has called restaurant scheduling a major pain point for operators. Scheduling efficiency and flexibility has grown more important as workers search for companies that offer such benefits. Perhaps reflective of this trend, 7shifts added more than 10,000 locations and over 400,000 workers to its platform in 2021.

If the Department of Labor implements regulations to allow non-tipped workers into tip pools, the company could also grow its recently debuted software to streamline tip pooling, which would save restaurateurs time by avoiding complicated manual data entry. Once tip pools are established on 7shifts platform, tip data is automatically synced through integrated point-of-sales systems, and 7shifts automatically calculates the proper distribution of tips.