Dyne, a Vancouver-based SaaS startup using tech to help restaurants improve their bottom line, has announced $1.5 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Weave VC — a local venture capital firm — and Inverted Ventures. Dyne is currently helping over 250 restaurants leverage machine learning and data analytics for smart-surge pricing, automated marketing, and revenue optimization strategies, helping remedy some of the damage from the pandemic.

Setting the table: In a blog post, Weave’s team detailed that it first met Dyne through the Valhalla Investment Summit in November 2021 — a natural introduction given Valhalla is the investment firm where Weave has its roots. The startup took the crown in the month-long pitch competition and also snagged a $65,000 prize. Another perk of winning? A spot in the Valhalla Investment Summit Finale. After the Finale, Weave’s team invested in Dyne as angels, leading to a $230,000 pre-seed round for the startup. 

Talk at the table: “We’ve been lucky enough to work closely with Dyne since then and have watched the team grow both personally and professionally,” Weave’s blog post continued. “Dyne took that $230,000 pre-seed investment and efficiently put the capital to use, growing monthly recurring revenues to over $60,000 today ([a ten-times increase] since January 2022), and increasing paying customers to over 250 ([about a ten-times increase] January 2022). They have also been successful in attracting large restaurant brands to adopt their SaaS tool.”

In highlighting these milestones, Dyne’s CTO Parsa Riahi noted that it takes a village. “It goes without saying that we couldn't have done it without the continuous support of our outstanding customers, team, partners, and mentors,” he wrote on LinkedIn. 

Appetizers for the table: Speaking of milestones, and in addition to previous pitch competitions, Dyne was one of two local startups to pitch at Collision’s PITCH: a competition that brings together the world’s leading early-stage companies to battle it out onstage (the other Vancouver company to pitch, Produce8, also recently announced a seed raise).

Another major support system for Dyne is UBC. The startup’s foundation was poured there with Dyne getting its start as a student-led venture that features in the Entrepreneurship@ubc portfolio. Further, another stepping stone was The Hatch Venture Builder: a collaborative initiative between Entrepreneurship@UBC and the Institute for Computing Information and Cognitive Systems (ICICS).

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