Groupon is selling Breadcrumb, a restaurant point-of-sale platform it acquired in 2012, to Upserve (formerly known as Swipely). The two companies were already engaged in a strategic partnership. There had been speculation for over a year that Groupon was looking to sell the business, including rumors of discussions between Groupon and Square.
Upserve offers a platform that provides tools and insights for restaurants to manage guests, staff and marketing. The match up make sense, as it will allow Upserve to offer a total restaurant management solution to customers, while gaining additional insights from payments data to improve the platform’s analytics component.
My guess is that Groupon figured out that payments is an all-in business, not a sideline. Serious players in payments have to constantly focus on innovation, the changing competitive landscape, compliance, and data security, all of which requires major ongoing investment and a critical mass of transaction volume to support it.
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