Olo Inc., an on-demand commerce platform, announced it will acquire Wisely Inc., a customer intelligence and engagement platform that enables restaurant brands to personalize the guest experience to maximize customer lifetime value.

Acquiring Wisely further demonstrates Olo’s commitment to its restaurant brands by bolstering its innovative solutions, which will empower restaurant brands to derive actionable insights from their data more readily in order to better understand their guests, the company said. This critical understanding enhances overall service, ultimately driving customer lifetime value with more efficient acquisition, retention, frequency, and spend initiatives. Through the acquisition, Olo will broaden its platform to include Wisely’s suite of customer intelligence products, giving each unique restaurant brand the power to curate their optimal technology stack from an expanded portfolio of solutions in conjunction with solutions from Olo’s open ecosystem of over one hundred technology partners.

“As we look to the future of digital entirety for restaurants, tools that help brands harness customer data and turn it into applicable insights will be essential for them to better serve guests and manage the restaurant enterprise as a whole,” says Noah Glass, founder and CEO of Olo. “Since partnering with Wisely, we have seen clear synergies between the two platforms and a close cultural alignment of putting restaurants first. We both succeed when our restaurant brands succeed, and there are clear areas of opportunity to provide intelligent products to better serve them. Wisely’s customer engagement platform, operations intelligence, and data capabilities complement Olo’s on-demand commerce platform and will together create a differentiated and wide breadth of product offerings that will accelerate our restaurant brands’ digital transformation.”

With a growing list of enterprise and emerging enterprise customers, Wisely’s leading software solutions include an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with marketing automation including email and SMS; Host, a table management, waitlist, and reservations solution; a guest sentiment tracker with aggregated and annotated guest reviews and feedback; and the first-ever Customer Data Platform (CDP) purpose-built for restaurants.

“With our platform, restaurant brands are better able to personalize the guest experience — in the dining room, online, and through digital means — to ultimately improve customer lifetime value. By joining with Olo, restaurant brands will have the ability to unify their transactions and their customers into a single, easy to use system,” says Mike Vichich CEO and Cofounder of Wisely.

The acquisition of Wisely is expected to provide a number of benefits to restaurants, their guests, and Olo, including:

• Wisely’s complementary solutions streamline restaurants’ digital transformation efforts, which position brands to improve overall service, deepen relationships with its guests, and enhance its top and bottom line performance
• Wisely accelerates Olo’s data ambitions and will allow brands to create a unified guest profile from disparate data sources, providing guests a better, more personalized ordering experience, which is designed to help restaurants win the competitive battle for digital dollars
• Wisely expands Olo’s platform capabilities, creating new offerings that will, for the first time, unlock Olo’s ability to directly serve brands’ marketing efforts
• Wisely’s differentiated portfolio creates an opportunity to introduce offerings to and drive incremental value for Olo’s approximately 74,000 restaurant locations

 

Transaction Details

Under the terms of the definitive agreement entered into on October 21, 2021, Olo will acquire Wisely for approximately $187 million, comprising of $77 million in cash and $110 million in Olo’s Class A common stock (subject to customary purchase price adjustments). The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021 and is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Additional information about the transaction will be available in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by Olo with the Securities and Exchange Commission.