Me&u Reservations is a SaaS platform for hospitality venues that will compete with American Express-owned Resy and DoorDash’s SevenRooms – and which the startup hopes will be its second act.
Me&u is on Wednesday launching a new booking platform that will expand the startup’s scope far beyond QR codes and compete with businesses owned by American Express and DoorDash.
Though the startup is known for the scannable codes that allow pub patrons to skip the bar queue and order drinks and food straight to the table, Me&u CEO Kim Teo said its new Reservations product will allow it to make customers of a far wider range of venues.
“We believe our addressable market in Australia 4x’s because of the Reservations product,” Teo said in an interview. “The Order & Pay product is really good for casual spots where the level of service is not the same as going to a full-service restaurant or a fine dining restaurant, whereas the booking product is applicable for any restaurant that takes a booking.”
Me&u Reservations combines a booking system that optimises venue floor space, an AI bot that speaks with customers who call to make or amend bookings, and event management for functions like engagement parties. The startup will at first look to sell subscriptions to bars and pubs that already use its QR codes, as well as more intimate and high-end restaurants.
Teo says the efficiencies afforded by AI allowed Me&u to develop Reservations without going back to investors for extra cash. She says Me&u has been profitable since July 2025 and that it has told investors it will remain profitable throughout 2026. Me&u’s financial year runs along the calendar year.
Me&u Reservations will face deep-pocketed and entrenched competition, however.
American Express in 2024 dropped US$400 million to buy booking platform Tock from Squarespace, following its 2019 purchase of Resy, adding to its hospitality business and allowing it to offer limited spots at swanky restaurants as a benefit for its credit card holders. DoorDash meanwhile spent US$1.2 billion on SevenRooms to extend its offerings beyond food delivery to dining in. Uber announced a tie up with OpenTable last year with similar aims.
“None of those players are really optimising for the operator themselves,” Teo said. They’re “optimising for the ride, optimising for [their] delivery network, or optimizing for [their] card loyalty network.
“It’s not that those incentives are completely misaligned 100 per cent of the time, but when stack ranked and when you’ve got to choose and when there’s teams that are clearly working on different agendas it can become hard to prioritise what the operators really want.”
The company reported losses of $22.9 million in the 12 months to December 31, 2024 on revenue of $57.5 million. If Me&u maintains profitability through 2026, it will have come after a tumultuous few years for the startup.
The Sydney startup was founded in 2018 by Stevan Premutico and won early investments from Merivale’s Justin Hemmes, Tyro Payments and chef Neil Perry before raising $30 million from Acorn Capital in 2022. Teo, meanwhile, founded Mr Yum in Melbourne, also in 2018, before raising a mega $89 million (US$65 million) Series A in 2021.
The two companies merged in 2023 amid the startup sector’s hangover from the heady pandemic days, reasoning it made sense to join forces rather than burn millions competing for the same market. The merged entity retained the me&u name and Teo as CEO, and went on to cut 10 per cent of its workforce in November 2024 – after both companies had slashed staff pre-merger.
“It’s quicker and faster to build product today… the way we think about resourcing is we’ve worked so hard to get to profitability, we don’t need to cut costs,” Teo said. “We actually just want to take the extra headcount that’s freed up from the benefits of efficiency and put them into things we would have never imagined we would have been able to build before.”
Me&u Reservations began 12 months ago as an internal experiment, Teo said. Despite reaching profitability, Teo said the company was considering raising more money from investors to finance international expansion, go-to-market efforts and more of the tinkering that created Me&u Reservations.
“When you’re running a break-even, slightly cash flow positive business, every dollar counts,” she said. “You don’t always have the capacity to play around with things that feel like the reward could be huge but you just don’t know yet.”
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