Dining out can often be stressful and more complicated than necessary. At least that was the experience of Smit Nebhwani and Amrish Patel, the founders of Voolsy. After numerous harrowing experiences of waiting endlessly for waiters, menus and other issues, the pair founded a restaurant dine-out mobile app in February 2016.

The startup’s app allows users to view menus online, order and customise meals, look at ratings and pay either via mobile wallet, debit or credit cards, and netbanking, thus saving time and improving efficiency.

“All of us have witnessed the waiting in restaurant for everything from menu to bill payment and that sometimes takes more time than the actual time we had for eating our meal,” Nebhwani told NewCrop. The Ahmedabad-based company aims to provide solutions to the wait time customers often experience at a restaurant, whether to receive a menu, understand dishes, or having to repeatedly call a member of the waitstaff.

“With Voolsy, the user just needs to go to the dining area be it a restaurant/cafe/pub/bar or a food court – select the dishes, place order and pay for food,” Irfan Pathan, Digital Marketing Manager, Voolsy said. “The tiring process of waiting for the waiter, selecting the dishes, calling for the waiter again to add more items and wait for the bill to arrive is replaced with a much better experience.”

Both sides, the user and the restaurant, benefit from Voolsy’s service. The restaurant can provide better service and receive audience feedback and analytics. Users, on the other hand, can receive faster service, access to information, and easier payment options.

With a current presence in seven cities across India, including Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Navi Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Jaipur, Voolsy was born after the founders had been working on IoT technology.

“We had been working with different technologies on IoT in 2015 and realized that iBeacons can be applied not only to offer wait less ordering but also to gather real time analytics on customer choices and preferences which can be used to render better user experiences,” Pathan said. “This realisation led to the idea of Voolsy.”

Features of the mobile app include automatically detecting restaurants, digital menus, customisation of orders, digital wallets, less wait times, access to order histories, and their new feature, ‘Scan & Pay.’ Voolsy calls it is an “iBeacon-based restaurant dineout app.”

The new feature allows users to make payments instantly through the app using Voolsy Credits by scanning the QR code.

“Other apps in the market offer their services either in ordering or in making payments with core service area as Home Delivery or Take Away,” Pathan said. “Voolsy is specifically meant for inside dining and it assists a customer in both effortless ordering and prompt payments making their dine-out experience even better.”

The self-funded company currently works with over 1500 active outlets including The Chocolate Room and Pizza Hut, according to the startup’s website. Voolsy aims to work with over 5,000 restaurants by the end of 2019.

“It’s been more than 2 years now, the results are impressive and the concept looks promising,” Pathan said. “We will be looking to raise funds in some time to multiply our growth by at least 60-70x.”

With over 5 lakh users, Voolsy is hoping to connect users with outlets and vice-versa, to bring a seamless and reliable dining experience to both parties.

The company plans to expand to Delhi, Gurugram, and Chennai, as well as further into the cities in which it is already active. Using their own funds so far, Voolsy has concentrated its capital towards growth of its user base, infrastructure, manpower and technology.

(Picture courtesy: Voolsy)