Published by Gbaf News
Posted on January 28, 2016
3 min readLast updated: January 22, 2026
Reactive Pricing to Fill Last-Moment Spaces in Local Restaurants
Award winning UK startup Wriggle is filling quiet times for the eat out sector, by giving local food and drink venues access to a revolutionary efficiency and discounting tool.
The platform’s functionality is simple – local businesses reactively reduce the price of their products to reach Wriggle customers who, in a couple of taps, make cut-price last-moment purchases over Wriggle. Customers are provided with location and time-relevant offers from businesses tailored to their preferences through a variety of channels.
Whilst reactive pricing is a common tool to manage capacity across other sectors (such as flights, trains, taxis and hotels), the same innovation hasn’t been applied to the eat-out sector, despite being a sector which sees vast discrepancies in demand based on season or time of day.
Wriggle tackles this last-moment capacity (4 tonnes of food waste per restaurant and £$7.2bn of empty tables worldwide per year) in a reactive manner. Wriggle tech development focuses on the three cornerstones leading to transaction i) the customer ii) the vendor iii) demand economics; detailed below.
Market Proven + Next-Phase Investment
Having proven demand for Reactive Pricing in the eat-out sector with 440 local businesses signed up across Bristol and London, 35,000 downloads and 15,000 last-moment transactions made – Wriggle is now raising investment to develop its technology and to prepare for scalable-launch across the UK, by inviting its loyal customer base to own equity in the brand as it raises a £350,000 round of investment through crowdfunding platform Seedrs: https://www.seedrs.com/wriggle1.
In particular, the investment will be used to build out their technology to provide the following key features:
Smart-platform analyzes customer data to provide what customers want, when and where they want it. Behavioural analysis will be performed by analysing data on customers’ preferences, sales, activity, discount rates, proximity, frequency etc. The algorithm will become smarter as customers purchase more often – allowing Wriggle to fine-tune individual preferences and our assumptions.
A data-driven dashboard for restaurants to track performance, review price-reductions, and create new price-reductions. The generalised business data and customer intelligence will direct businesses as to the optimised content to create. This will allow them to target the market more efficiently and respond directly to customer needs and expectations.
Fluctuate pricing based on real-time activity, levels of capacity, and remaining time of availability. This reinforces the concept of the perishability of the content, pushes people to book early and boosts sales during quiet times.
Already with over three hundred investors in the company from a previous Seedrs round in Summer 2014, this is expected to double the number of investors to over six hundred investors.
Over the last 18 months, Wriggle has been developing its offering, growing its user base, generating transactional revenue and won several awards along the way, including being selected by Seedcamp to join their highly regarded intake of startups to back.
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