ShopKeep Acquires Restaurant Payments Service

Payments startup ShopKeep is acquiring Ambur, a mPOS software company that powers payment processing for over 1,500 restaurants, for an undisclosed amount.

With the acquisition, the company will absorb Ambur’s merchant base, which would continue to use Ambur’s POS solution, pushing the total number of ShopKeep-powered merchants to well over 20,000 spread across the United States and Canada. ShopKeep has also added Ambur Cofounder Ansar Khan, who will further help with growing the business, according to a press release.

“Ambur provides an excellent point-of-sale app that was created by a restaurant owner, for restaurant owners,” said Norm Merritt, ShopKeep’s president and CEO. “This acquisition allows ShopKeep to further our reach into the restaurant industry and expand our overall market share amongst independent merchants.”

The acquisition comes after ShopKeep, which supports cloud-based technology and business solutions for independent merchants, secured $60 million in Series D funding in July this year. The investment round was led by Activant Capital, with support from existing investors, bringing its total funding to $97.2 million. Earlier this year, the New York City-based company also acquired Payment Revolution to power its POS terminals with payment processing capabilities.

Ambur’s POS software has a wider functionality with an ability to handle front-end sales, payments processing and back office management.

Even though ShopKeep is well behind its competitor Square, which processed $30 billion in payments last year, the company is seeing rapid growth in the market. In the last year, ShopKeep says it grew over 130 percent and is well on track to process $6 billion in payments on its cloud-based platform, according to TechCrunch.

The company reportedly charges its 20,000 merchants $49 per month for providing its payments register, which includes an iPad and supporting hardware with an Apple Pay/EMV reader, and an additional $1,000 for setting it up, TechCrunch reported.

In December 2014, the company began offering a deal that gave merchants signing up for its service free card readers that could process Apple Pay and EMV transactions.

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