Atland Ventures is thrilled to announce our investment into Availyst! Availyst is a food discovery platform that helps consumers find their food.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the way we interact with and search for food. In 2022, over 60% of consumers utilized mobile ordering at least once a week, and 31% ordered more than once a week. 120 million people in the United States already “app hop” to compare options when shopping, which demonstrates a lack of vendor loyalty, preference and circumstance-driven vendor selection.

 

Remote search and ordering drive user behavior, but current search engines are ill-equipped to meet the needs of users. Competing apps, paid search, and legacy systems skew results toward ad budgets and high fees, not consumer preference. Mismatched results mean consumers lose hundreds of hours and dollars to get mediocre results. It also means businesses are losing millions trying to reach people who already want their product. 

 

Finding where to dine out is no picnic either – there are tons of restaurant discovery and reservation platforms, none of which have access to every option out there nor are personalized to each user. Scrolling through restaurant “discovery” apps could take upwards of 20 minutes, still leaving users unsatisfied with results. This is yet another example of the decision fatigue that plagues our generation. 

 

In short, food search is broken. 

 

Availyst is a food discovery platform that helps users find and compare their local options for grocery, restaurant, convenience, and alcohol and matches them with what they really want.

Powered by custom AI technology, Availyst improves customer shopping experience and makes food ordering less daunting and time-consuming, focusing on personalized discovery. 

 

Mobile food ordering accounts for over 60% of all digital restaurant orders today and that number will only increase as consumers are able to digitally discover food that they’ll love. Availyst is tapping into the $80 billion US food and beverage e-commerce industry. In fact, groceries and dining out are the top monthly spending categories for Availyst’s target market, Gen Z and Millenials. This is a massive market opportunity for Availyst to become the destination for all searching related to food. 

 

Across their 27 vendor service partners, Availyst provides their 4,000+ users over 400,000 stores and restaurants that they are able to search across. Growing at 30% month-over-month, The platform has validated the consumer need with over  88% of users saying that they would recommend the app to a friend. 

 

I’ve personally been an active user of Availyst since July 2022, when I met the team. I had the privilege of working in the same space as Availyst’s Founder & CEO Mandy Poston and COO Alec Kissell for the duration of the 2022 Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator Program based in Minneapolis this past summer. It was unbelievably easy to connect with a team like Availyst’s – charismatic, hard working, and appreciative of a good pun … or two. Both Mandy and Alec have a proven track record in the startup space, bootstrapping a company for over 6 years from the ground up to over 70+ employees, thousands of contractors, over $20M in ARR, and PE funding round. The pair is incredibly dedicated to building a customer-centric product that consumers love and trust. 

 

As a friend and new investor, I couldn’t be more excited to officially welcome Availyst to Atland as a portfolio company – the fund is thrilled to support and see the journey that lies ahead. 

 

Sources: