"McDonald's sets its sights on Silicon Valley with two takeovers" (MCD)

From PitchBook:

For the second time this year, McDonald's has agreed to acquire a young company building tech that could help prepare the Golden Arches for the future. And it sounds like it might be just the beginning of the fast-food giant's ambitions in the world of startups.

McDonald's announced plans Tuesday to purchase Apprente, a developer of voice-based conversational software that could soon be used to automatically listen to and process orders for Happy Meals and Big Macs at a location near you. McDonald's also revealed that Apprente's staff will become the founding members of a new team within the company called McD Tech Labs, which will spearhead an initiative to make the burger business a bigger presence in Silicon Valley. Expect more tech-focused hires to come.

With its headquarters in Mountain View, Apprente would seem well-placed to coordinate those efforts. The company was founded in 2017, and it revealed its only round of private funding in 2018, a $4.75 million seed round that included backing from AME Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners and StageOne Ventures.

McDonald's announced the takeover of another startup back in March, reportedly agreeing to pay more than $300 million for Dynamic Yield, which creates digital menu displays that can be updated and personalized in real time to account for any number of factors, ranging from what else a customer is ordering to the weather forecast. McDonald's says it's already installed the company's tech in more than 8,000 locations, with hopes to spread that footprint to every drive-through in the US by the end of the year.

The move came less than nine months after Dynamic Yield raised $32 million in Series D funding from Viola Growth and Union Tech Ventures, taking its total backing to $77 million. Based in both New York and Tel Aviv, the company counted Ikea and HelloFresh among its clientele before striking a sale agreement with McDonald's.....MORE