Backing Nory: the intelligent restaurant OS

Jamie Tomalin, Triple Point Ventures, explains why the team backed Nory.

Nory centralises the core operational functions needed to run a successful hospitality venue into a single, intelligent application. It analyses data across business functions, daily revenue, employee scheduling and supply-chain needs, and uses it to suggest operational efficiencies for teams on the ground, enabling them to run venues more efficiently and reduce costs.

Founder–market fit

Does domain expertise help a founding team? The iconic contradiction is PayPal, a team of up-and-comers powered by raw tenacity and IQ, or Elon Musk in seemingly… everything. Logic follows that a level of naivety is what’s needed to recreate the rulebook of a given vertical; radical ideas come from outsiders. But what if you can have the best of both worlds?

A fund manager walks into a chicken shop

Well, not quite, but in the case of Nory’s founder Conor, restless with life in fund management, he decided to start a chain of chicken shops: Mad Egg. Five years later, this relative outsider had helped turn Mad Egg into one of Ireland’s fastest-growing independent restaurants, 5 locations, over 100 people and EBITDA margins 3x the sector average.

Restaurants are hard, punctuated by low average net profit margins (2–6%) and high staff turnover (c.60–70% p.a.). Faced with these problems and disillusioned with the software available, Conor looked to leverage data and ML to better inform his operations, starting Nory in 2020 to help hospitality venues more intelligently manage their business and restaurant operations.

The product is accessed via mobile app or web and currently has three core components:

• Workforce Management
• Inventory Management
• Performance Insights & Predictive Forecasting

Since launching in 2021 Nory has expanded across 5 countries and now services over 200 locations: including customers like Stonegate, Dr Juice and Viva Italia, with customers reporting up to 20% increases in EBITDA.

We are excited to be partnering with Conor and the rest of the Nory team to fuel their next stage of growth by co-leading their €7m Seed round alongside Samaipata and existing investors Cavalry, Playfair & Anamcara Capital.

Data, data, data, data

Nory are certainly not the first to address the hospitality industry’s problems with software, but perhaps that’s the point. Hospitality groups turn to restaurant-management software to drive operating leverage, managing payroll, staff scheduling, inventory, procurement, food waste, compliance & safety.

The status quo is to rely on either legacy one-stop-shop solutions (Fourth or Zonal) or multiple independent point solutions. The former offer poor UX and sub-optimal analytical insights due to architectural constraints; the latter face high cost and, importantly, data silos and a lack of interoperability.

Much as Toast, Olo or Sunday are consolidating front-of-house point solutions around their platforms, we believe Nory has the potential to become the de facto solution for restaurant management. Key to their value proposition is the decision to integrate with a customer’s other business systems (accounting, PoS, payroll), positioning themselves as an important system of record holding the unified data source within an organisation.

This business data, combined with exogenous factors like weather, events and seasonality, is modelled to provide hourly demand forecasts, enabling more intelligent insights throughout the product, e.g. auto-scheduling the rota or informing inventory management based on predicted demand.

We are excited to be partnering with Conor and the whole Nory team as they aim to drive operational efficiencies for the hospitality industry, globally!