Scour Groupon or Living Social, and you are bound to get inundated by a flood of daily dining deals. Group buying for food makes sense: there are plenty of opportunities to upsell more expensive items on the menu. Besides, word about good food can spread really quickly, enabling a business to gather a new customer base without much marketing expenditure.
But with hundreds of daily deals on the menu, how do you close in on one that will appeal to your taste buds (and your wallet)?
That’s where BiteHunter steps in.
This New York based startup has built the world’s first real time meta search engine for daily dining deals. Think Kayak for food deals. It digs through the deals, happy hours and specials on various websites, and displays them all neatly on a map of the city. You can zero-in based on your choice of cuisine, restaurant, or location. It all works quite smoothly and the deal database is always up-to-date.
After raising $250k in seed funding in 2010, the company has now chewed off $800k from angel investors Avraham Kadar and Eyal Chomsky. According to co-founder Gil Harel, this funding will help in expanding BiteHunter’s offerings in the mobile space with two big features in the works: a push notification system that will alert users to nearby deals based on their so social media activity (Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, etc.), along with a way to buy deals within the BiteHunter app itself.
I can see the utility of a search engine for daily dining deals. Combing through each daily deals site can be terribly cumbersome and time consuming. Kayak made it easy to search for air tickets without visiting half a dozen sites simultaneously; BiteHunter should bring the same disruption to the daily deals space.
