Groupon just sold its restaurant software business to a startup

Four years after Groupon acquired restaurant software business Breadcrumb, the commerce company has sold it to Upserve, a startup that also makes restaurant software, in an all-stock deal. The companies declined to disclose the exact size of the purchase.

Breadcrumb was founded in 2011 with the goal of making checkout software -- known as point-of-sale software in the industry -- that retail operations could use to manage their business from an iPad. Groupon bought it a year later, but has been trying to find a new home for it for the past year as it focused on re-igniting its core deals business.

Upserve, formerly known as Swipely, sells subscriptions to software that restaurants use to do things like create loyalty programs, track performance of service and process credit card payments. Upserve CEO Angus Davis told Recode that Breadcrumb gives the startup its own point-of-sale software it can sell to new restaurants just getting started, or existing customers looking to switch to more modern software.

Upserve and Breadcrumb now have a presence in more than 6,000 restaurants combined, which serve more than 20 million meals a month. The majority of the couple of dozen Groupon employees who were focused on Breadcrumb will be joining Upserve in the deal.