With HyprLoco, chains can treat every customer like a regular

Tech Startup: HyprLoco

Where: Denver
Web: www.hyprloco.com
founded: 2013

Initial Lightbulb: Co-founders Nic Gray and Damon Baker met through a mutual colleague before launching HyprLoco. The military veterans shared a keen insight into the value of good intelligence. “You want to have the best intelligence you can,” Gray says.

That’s true in the military, and it’s also true in business, so the duo paired up to take Baker’s data-driven concepts to multiple industries. The company now has nearly 20 employees and contractors, with Gray serving as CEO and Baker as CTO.

In a Nutshell: “HyprLoco is a software interface platform that connects the world around you, creating a personalized experience for everyone,” Gray says. “We’re a complete middleware platform. We’re all about APIs and SDKs.”

The initial target market is the burgeoning fast-casual restaurant industry. Gray says HyprLoco’s Digital Concierge platform allows national chains with thousands of locations to treat every customer as a regular.

“We’re taking mobile ordering and making it intelligent,” says Gray, noting that a full 20 percent of Starbucks orders are now mobile. “The intelligence . . . is providing them with a huge competitive advantage.”

Digital Concierge streamlines the process so customers who place mobile orders know where to go when they arrive. Gray says that several undisclosed chains with 500 to 2,000 units are currently piloting the platform.

“It’s all about line management,” says Gray. “These people are seeing 50 to 250 people a day walk out because of lines out the door.” Pilot users of Digital Concierge “have been able to reduce that by 50 percent.” That could equate to a return on investment of hundreds of dollars a day for a monthly fee of $50 to $250 per location.

Steve Bigari, CEO of Synq3, a HyprLoco partner, is bullish on the company’s prospects. “We partnered with HyprLoco to create a game-changing geofencing application for the restaurant space,” he says. “They were responsive to every request and detail and their service is exemplary. They have an incredible command of the technology and more importantly have seamlessly synchronized it with the restaurant staff and guests.”

But Gray and Baker are eying different industries for their next releases. “The second product we are releasing is on the opposite end of the spectrum: for manufacturing and industrial clients,” says Gray. The target is catalyzing “smarter and safer workplaces” by using mobile technology to permission users on various equipment, he explains. “If they don’t have permissions, a kill switch goes off on the machine,”  and the system automatically sends messages to management and HR.

The Market: Gray says quick-service and fast-casual restaurants are a $500 billion annual market that spends as much as $100 billion on loyalty programs, point-of-sale systems, and other tools that overlap with Digital Concierge. For the yet-to-be-named enterprise product, HyprLoco is targeting assurance and insurance companies to supply to customers.

Financing: HyprLoco closed on a seed round of $1.25 million from Pallasite Ventures earlier in 2016. “That gives us runway into the first and middle of next year,” says Gray. “We will be positioning for a Series A by the middle of next year.”