Westpac invests in Australian hospitality payments platform

Investors in Australia are backing a point-of-sale platform that will allow merchants to more quickly integrate payments and other applications into their terminals.

Westpac-backed venture fund Reinventure has allocated $1 million in seed funding to Melbourne-based hospitality app Doshii.

Westpac Bank in Sydney has been aggressive in its support of new merchant and payment technology in Australia for the past two years. An application interface platform, Doshii connects apps and payments devices to POS terminals, helping merchants to reduce the clutter and complexity that comes with integrating to multiple service providers.

Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg

Sean O'Meara, CEO of hospitality sector POS vendor Impos, founded Doshii at a time when integrated payments are becoming the norm in merchant networks.

"We could see that there was going to be a spike in apps and payments wanting to connect to POS," O'Meara said in a Jan. 30 press release. "Both apps, payments and POS all have the same issue, which is the time and cost to integrate and then the on-going cost to maintain each integration."

By operating with Doshii, a company's IT team could avoid spending so much time on an expensive and complex integration process and instead "be spending their time actually making their product better for customers," O'Meara added. "It’s a clear win for POS and apps to have one API platform for integration."

Doshii shares its revenue with POS vendors, including H&L, SwiftPOS and Starrtec, while providing support for apps such as Mobi2Go, Nestle, SureFire, Tanda, Collect Loyalty and ANZ BladePay.

Reinventure's first $50 million fund was launched in 2014 and has since invested in 10 Australian startups — SocietyOne, Coinbase, Nabo, Zetaris, PromisePay, Hey You, Auror, Data Republic, Flare and Valiant.