Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Online restaurant menu startup Locu lands seed money

By Rodney H. Brown

Cambridge startup Locu Inc. has taken in $623,000 in a seed round of funding from both local angels and West Coast investors.

The company, which operates online restaurant menu content service at www.menuplatform.com, is being incubated at Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge. Locu is taking the funding from a syndicate of angel investors, including Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot Inc., Jean Hammond, Michael Abbott of Twitter, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, Ed Roberts, Matt Ocko, Mitch Roberts and early stage investment fund Quotidian Ventures. The details were reported initially on the website TechCrunch and confirmed by co-founder and CEO Rene Reinsberg.

Locu was born at MIT, and in addition to Reinsberg, the founding team includes CTO Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos, chief scientist Marek Olszewski and COO Marc Piette. Sidiroglou-Douskos was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT CSAIL and Olszewski is a Ph.D. candidate at CSAIL, according to the Locu website and their respective LinkedIn profiles.

In addition to allowing a customer to update the content of its online menu, Locu’s MenuPlatform handles announcing those changes out to social media, like Facebook and Twitter, according to its website. Reinsberg said in an email that the company is aiming for a commercial release of MenuPlatform this fall, and is in talks with “a lot of Boston restaurants and restaurant groups” and that initial feedback from them has been “very positive.”