Everyone had his Luca app on their cell phones during Corona. Now founder and CEO Patrick Hennig wants to turn it into a gastro super app. Culture4life
Patrick Hennig, CEO and co-founder of Luca, the ex-Corona contact tracking app, which is now a gastro app after a pivot, is happy about a new investor. A strategic one: the Berlin HR Group joined him in an expansion of the seed round. The hotel operating company includes hotel groups such as Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, Radisson, as well as Accor, IHG and Deutsche Hospitality. The group’s hotels accommodate around 10 million guests every year.
This means that more than 40 million euros have flowed into the “new” Luca app since the beginning of 2022, reports the founder in an interview with Gründerszene. “We invested the majority of the money in technology,” explains Hennig, in the development and expansion of a platform that would bring users and operators from the hospitality industry together. And more: In Hennig’s own words, Luca should become a “platform for everyday life”.
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Vision: Gastro-Super-App
Already after the first round, after Luca’s parent company Culture4Life received an investment of 30 million euros in spring 2022, including from Ramin Niroumand, founder of the fintech incubator Finleap, and Julian Teicke from Wefox, who through his investment company The Delta After he got on board, Hennig had explained his plans for the new Luca to Gründerszene. At the height of the pandemic, Luca came onto the scene as an app that was intended to help health authorities track contacts in order to contain the number of infections. People used the app to check into restaurants, bars, cafés and events.
Now Luca should become something of a nightlife super app. Retrieving menus, reserving a table, searching for restaurants and, above all, paying the bill digitally with just one click – the app should make all of this possible. Even if Hennig was cautious: “I’m a bit hesitant to talk about a super app.” Often that’s just a buzzword.
More than a payment solution
But it was clear to him and his Berlin team from the start that payment alone would not be enough. “So we kept adding more features,” says Hennig. And the restaurants were just the beginning. Much more is now possible with the hotels: From January 2024, features such as contactless payment for overnight stays, ordering food and drinks in the hotel catering as well as digital check-in and check-out in the HR Group’s hotels will be gradually introduced via the app be introduced. App users should be able to store their data in their profile so that billing in the hotel is accelerated, regardless of whether they are traveling for business or pleasure.
And important for Hennig: tourists could use the app to quickly find restaurants in foreign cities, make reservations and pay there. Especially in view of the coming year and the increase in VAT in the catering industry, he hopes to become a helpful lead donor for restaurateurs.
Internationalization is not a priority
Hennig explains that he initially wants to concentrate on the German market. Of course, the partnership with the hotel group is a springboard into foreign markets, but that is not a priority for him. The HR Group’s investment in Luca was not the result of strategic calculations, but rather arose from his work on cracking the German hospitality market: “We didn’t actually talk about an investment, but about how we, the HR Group and Luca, can work together on content within the framework of a partnership.” When that worked well, he asked himself whether the hotel operator should not be taken on board. “And that quickly met with approval from the other side,” says Hennig.
Here you can see the pitch deck that explains the vision of the new Luca app and its functions and convinced the hotel company’s decision-makers.
By the way, you can find more success and million-dollar pitch decks on our pitch deck topic page.
Luca/ culture4life GmbH
Luca/ culture4life GmbH
Luca/ culture4life GmbH