DoorDash Capital, Bbot Acquisition Just A Layover to Full Restaurant POS Offering

As DoorDash adds capital lending to its product offering, we think this is just a collision course with POS.

DoorDash needs to grow pretty dramatically to satiate investors, and there are really three vectors:

1. Adjacent verticals, like cstore, grocery, and retail
2. Verticalization of food production via ghost kitchens, taking 100% of the food spend as opposed to 30% (or whatever their average is)
3. ARPU expansion with new product offering on their existing base

Clearly their lending efforts fall into that third bucket, but we have to ask: why not just build a POS at this point?

How about you start with acquiring Bbot, a QR ordering company that was already on its way to being a POS.

For those of you saying building a POS from a QR ordering platform it’s a heavy lift, hear us out.

A POS is basically just a KDS (kitchen display system) anymore – everything else is headless commerce and an API call.

As customer ordering flows move more off-prem, the way transactions route has changed, and QR ordering companies like GoTab have continued with the feature accretion of traditional POS and are, in effect, offering a POS replacement.

It might not satiate every segment of the market, but neither did Toast when they started.

To some extent this is the bet Olo is making: can we build enough of the necessary features for in-store ordering that traditional operators will recognize that half of traditional POS is bloat as customer ordering nodes change?

Anyhow, don’t discount DoorDash’s aspirations to own more of the restaurants stack, and POS would be the common denominator needed to do that.

We’d question how much support infrastructure DoorDash wants to build, but to find top line growth they might not have many other choices.