The statement, “We’re developing a decentralized ghost kitchen,” is likely to initiate numerous discussions with potential investors, and Alex Canter, the CEO of Ordermark, understands this potential.

The 29-year-old CEO has, in fact, created a decentralized ghost kitchen and successfully secured a $120 million investment round from SoftBank’s latest Vision Fund, as the company announced today.

“We’ve identified a chance to increase order volume for restaurants through a new service called Nextbite,” Canter explained. “Nextbite represents a collection of delivery-exclusive restaurant brands available solely on platforms like UberEats, DoorDash, and Postmates.”

SoftBank required minimal persuasion after learning about Nextbite.

Representatives from the latest Vision Fund contacted Canter shortly after the company’s previous funding announcement in 2019. Canter had only recently begun exploring Nextbite at that time, but the venture now generates a substantial portion of the company’s revenue and is projected to represent a significant percentage of its overall business in the coming year.

“We are impressed by Ordermark’s leading technology platform and its groundbreaking virtual restaurant ideas, which are reshaping the restaurant sector,” stated Jeff Housenbold, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “Alex and the Ordermark team possess a thorough understanding of the difficulties faced by independent restaurants. We are pleased to support their efforts to assist these restaurants in optimizing online ordering and increasing revenue from underutilized kitchen space.”

This represents a noteworthy shift for a company that initially functioned as a centralized system for restaurants to manage online delivery orders from services such as GrubHub, Postmates, and Uber Eats.

Canter is well-versed in the restaurant industry. His family operates Canters, a renowned delicatessen in Los Angeles, and Ordermark originated as a solution to manage the operational complexities caused by the influx of delivery-service orders at the restaurant.

Currently, instead of managing a single restaurant brand, Canter oversees 15. Unlike Cloud Kitchens, Kitchen United, or Reef, Ordermark does not construct or operate new kitchens. Instead, the company collaborates with restaurants it has carefully vetted, utilizing their existing kitchen capacity as quasi-franchisees.

While the majority of the restaurant concepts are developed in-house, Ordermark is open to occasional celebrity endorsements. Its Nextbite service has partnered with Wiz Khalifa to create HotBox by Wiz, a delivery-only restaurant specializing in “stoner-friendly snacks.”

The first brand Canter introduced was The Grilled Cheese Society, which leveraged unused kitchen space in locations such as a Los Angeles nightclub and smaller restaurants along the East Coast, expanding to 100 locations nationwide.

The expansion of the HotBox brand exemplifies the potential growth Nextbite can facilitate. Since its launch in early October, the brand has grown to a footprint that will encompass 50 cities by the end of the month, according to Canter.

Nextbite’s existence is, in many ways, dependent on Ordermark’s order aggregation technology. “Ordermark’s technology is structured to not only consolidate online orders into a single system, but also to integrate multiple brands into that same system.”

Restaurants that partner with Nextbite to fulfill orders face minimal upfront costs and stand to gain significantly, according to Canter. Restaurants earn a 30% profit margin on each order they complete for one of Ordermark’s brands, Canter stated.

To join Nextbite’s network, businesses undergo a vetting process by Ordermark. The company analyzes which types of restaurants are performing well in different areas and develops menus tailored to those trends. For example, Nextbite recently launched a hot chicken sandwich brand in response to the item’s growing popularity on digital delivery platforms.

Restaurants are selected based on their ability to prepare the menu style of the delivery-only brand created by Ordermark’s Nextbite division.

Guy Simsiman, a Denver-based chef, is responsible for developing new menus for the company.

“We are focused on creating concepts that are scalable, and we conduct thorough vetting to identify the appropriate fulfillment partners,” Canter said. “When a restaurant agrees to become a fulfillment partner, we evaluate them and provide training on the necessary procedures… We guide them through the process of becoming a fulfillment partner for these concepts. Extensive training is provided, followed by secret shopping and review monitoring to ensure quality.”

While Nextbite may represent the future of Ordermark’s business, the company’s overall financial standing appears strong. It is on the verge of processing $1 billion in orders through its system.

“Our current priority is assisting restaurants in navigating the challenges of COVID-19, and the most effective way to do so is by concentrating on the incremental revenue generated by the Nextbite business,” Canter said when asked about the company’s future direction.

Nextbite was developed over a period of time and launched at the end of last year, prior to the onset of COVID-19. When the pandemic began, restaurants across the country needed to find innovative ways to offset the decline in foot traffic,” he explained. Nextbite offered a solution.