The irony wasn't lost on Christine de Wendel when she talks about Sunday's early days: a restaurant payment platform born from the chaos of COVID lockdowns, only to nearly collapse under its own expansion two years later.
Now, the Atlanta-based company—spun out of Big Mamma, the European restaurant group known for its theatrical Italian dining—is back with $21 million in fresh capital and a more disciplined playbook. DST Global Partners participated in the Series B round, announced November 13, 2025, pushing Sunday's total raised to roughly $145 million since its 2021 debut.
The funding comes as Sunday processes north of $4 billion in annual payments across more than 3,000 restaurants scattered between the U.S., U.K., and France. Not bad for a startup that, just over two years ago, was retreating from four countries and laying off staff in what de Wendel herself described at the time as an existential reckoning.
The Money and What It Means
Multiple reports identify DST Global as leading this round, though Sunday's official materials use the softer language of "participation" from DST Global Partners—a distinction that may say something about how carefully the company is managing its narrative these days.
This Series B follows a breathless fundraising sprint in 2021: a $24 million seed from Coatue in April, then a whopping $100 million Series A from the same firm just five months later in September. That kind of velocity felt typical for the era's frothier days. Today? Sunday says it's tripling payment volume year-over-year, handling 80 million transactions in 2025, and creeping toward profitability. Whether profitability is actually the priority remains another question—the company freely admits it's still optimizing for growth over margins.
Restaurant tech investors have learned hard lessons about scaling too fast. Sunday certainly did.
From Big Mamma to Big Ambitions
Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, the cofounders behind Big Mamma's buzzy European restaurant empire, didn't set out to become fintech entrepreneurs. They were simply frustrated. COVID had forced diners to rethink every interaction, and the clunky ritual of settling a check—waiting for the server, fumbling with cards, calculating tips—felt painfully outdated.
Their solution: Sunday. A QR code-based payment system that started simple but has since sprawled into ordering, loyalty programs, CRM tools, and white-labeled enterprise offerings for larger groups. De Wendel, who previously served as COO at French e-commerce player ManoMano, joined as cofounder and took the reins as U.S. CEO, steering the company's most critical market.
The platform now connects to over 50 point-of-sale systems—Toast, Lightspeed, NCR among them. Last May, Sunday rolled out "Aloha Pay-At-Table, powered by sunday" in partnership with NCR Voyix, a signal that it's courting bigger enterprise deals beyond independent operators.
Its client roster reads like a cross-section of upscale dining: Lettuce Entertain You and Gibsons Restaurant Group in Chicago, TAO's nightlife-meets-dining empire, The Boathouse at Disney Springs in Orlando. Over in Europe, it's working with London's Dishoom and Gordon Ramsay's sprawling restaurant group. The company now employs about 250 people, split across its transatlantic operations.
The 2022 Stumble Nobody Forgets
July 2022 should've been a victory lap for Sunday. Instead, it became a brutal stress test.
Flush with Coatue's capital, the company had charged into Italy, Spain, Canada, and Portugal alongside its core U.S., U.K., and French markets. But the economics weren't working—at least not fast enough to satisfy newly skittish investors who'd started whispering about "unit economics" and "burn rates" again.
Sunday pulled out of 60% of its markets practically overnight. Staff cuts followed. The company's leadership insists the retrenchment was strategic, not desperate. Perhaps. But it's also the kind of recalibration that tends to haunt pitch decks and due diligence calls for years afterward.
Since then, Sunday has rebuilt deliberately. Payment volumes tripled. The product portfolio expanded. The business inched closer to breakeven.
Where the New Money Goes
This $21 million won't fund another sprawling global land grab—at least, not exactly. De Wendel says the capital will support U.S. expansion into Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Denver, Las Vegas, and Boston. Measured growth, in other words, city by city.
There's also a curious international exception: the United Arab Emirates. Sunday plans to enter the UAE market in January 2026, with its first major restaurant group scheduled to go live that month. Why the Middle East after retreating from Southern Europe? The company isn't saying much yet, but it's a reminder that even chastened startups still take calculated risks.
Beyond geography, Sunday is plowing money into product development—particularly tools that work across different restaurant formats, from quick-service chains to white-tablecloth establishments. The company operates on a dual revenue model, capturing a slice of payment processing fees plus a monthly SaaS subscription. It's a hedge, essentially: recurring revenue from the software, transactional upside from the payments.
Sunday touts some compelling metrics. Restaurants save 12 minutes per table, it says. Tips jump 11% in the U.S. (servers have noticed). Five-star Google reviews increase by 5 to 10 times. And 83% of diners who scan Sunday's QR codes follow through and pay via the platform—a conversion rate that would make most e-commerce operators envious.
Are these numbers representative or cherry-picked? Hard to say without independent verification, but they're the kinds of stats that get restaurant operators' attention during sales calls.
The Road Ahead (And the Ghosts Behind)
Sunday wants to double revenue, guest volumes, and product adoption by summer 2026. That's ambitious, though perhaps more realistic than the original blitzscaling playbook that nearly sank the company.
"We're building the category-defining platform for hospitality," de Wendel said in the company's announcement, "one that connects every touchpoint into a single, frictionless experience."
It's the kind of language startups deploy when they're thinking about market dominance, not just survival. Whether Sunday can actually claim that category-defining throne remains to be seen. Toast went public and is still fighting for restaurant share. Square (now Block) isn't going anywhere. Competitors are circling.
But for a company that once teetered on the edge, simply having another shot—backed by DST Global's deep pockets and a clearer sense of what not to do—might be enough for now. The 2022 retreat still hangs over Sunday like a cautionary tale. The difference, perhaps, is that this time they remember it.
