Cantaloupe Makes a Play for Stadium Pay With a $4.75 Million Deal for Cheq

Cantaloupe Inc., a provider of cashless payment technology for the self-service market, has acquired Cheq Inc. for $4.75 million, Cantaloupe announced late Thursday. Cheq is a payments and ordering platform for sports, entertainment, and hospitality venues. 

With the acquisition, Malvern, Pa.-based Cantaloupe can enter what has become in recent years a highly competitive business: payments acceptance for sports stadiums, entertainment, and hospitality venues, festivals, and theme parks, as well as full-service and fast-casual restaurants.

Entry into these new markets is something Cantaloupe has been exploring for the past couple of years, says Ravi Venkatesan, Cantaloupe’s chief executive.

“This is an area we have been looking at for some time, and the question has been, do we build a solution on our own or acquire a company that has one we can build upon,” Venkatesan says. “Our aim is to provide the technology behind commerce, whether it be e-commerce or physical commerce, and this acquisition expands our addressable market into a new and rapidly growing sector.”

Cantaloupe has been a chief provider of payments processing for the vending and popup-market businesses. Now the Cheq acquisition brings to Cantaloupe some marquee names in the sports and entertainment world, including the Washington Commanders of the National Football League, the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League, the Miami Marlins of Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union, CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore, and Loud & Live, which stages events in North America, South America, and Europe.

Cheq’s platform includes an ordering and payment app that enables consumers to send food and drinks directly to their friends or family members at sports, entertainment, or hospitality venues. Cheq, a Seattle-based company founded only three years ago, also allows businesses to white-label its technology to build customer loyalty to their brands. 

Payments at sports, entertainment, and hospitality venues has grown into an extremely competitive business, with the likes of such powerhouses as Shift4 Inc. and Fiserv Inc.’s Clover Sport unit carving out substantial market share. Venkatesan says Cantaloupe’s point of differentiation will be that self-service and business-management applications are a core part of its offering, not an add on.

“We already work with many of the food-and-beverage service vendors that have operations in sports, entertainment, and hospitality, but that don’t have a self-service component in those markets, and are in need of software that can help them manage inventory and make merchandising decisions,” says Venkatesan. “We are not just about self-service payments. We also address back-end operating efficiencies for food-and-beverage service companies.”

Cantaloupe has links to more than 1 million active locations and processes more than 1 billion transactions per year.