An Elegant Solution To The Most Annoying Problem With Eating Out
That's why - after waiting for what seemed like an eternity for their check one New Year's Day - Jeff McGregor and Gennady Spirin founded Dash. It's an app that connects directly with a restaurant or bar's checkout program to get you squared away instantly.
If you're at a participating restaurant - there are about 40 in NYC and 20 in Chicago - all you have to do is tell you waiter that you're using Dash. Then check in on the app.
When you're done, you'll see your itemized check on the screen. Add the tip, and then with one touch and you're done.
The two Rutgers roommates launched the company back in 2011. At that time, mobile pay wasn't something restaurants were familiar with. They were concerned about how the app would function with their point of sales programs.
"When we were selling to restaurants in 2011, it was totally different. Any restaurant we spoke to had no idea about mobile payments. It's been a complete 180," McGregor told Business Insider.
Now, however, mobile payment has gotten all sorts of buzz (think: Uber, Apple Pay). Plus, bars especially like that with Dash, fewer customers skip out on tabs, or forget their cards and then cancel charges.
"We see most of our success at high volume bars," said McGregor, admitting jokingly - "I hold the record for most credit cards left in NYC."
Dash raised $750,000 back in 2013 with investments from the New York Angels and One Group CEO Jonathan Segal. Then the company raised another $1.2 million in February of this year.
In that time Dash has gotten approval on one patent - for the technology that connects your phone to a point of sales program and splits a bill - and applied for three more. This is key, because they know the mobile payments space is heating up. It's obvious based on Dash's own sales transaction volume.
The app's top venues are seeing 1,000 transactions a week, and will process over 100,000 transactions in volume in a single venue this month. That's 200% month over month growth in aggregate transactional volume for 2014.
This explosion mirrors the entire mobile payments market. Globally, mobile payments reached $256 billion in 2012, and are expected to increase to $796 billion by 2014, according to research from Bank Systems and Technology.
So yes, the timing for this is pretty good.