NOQ Raises £3.5M to Eliminate Queuing at Stadiums, Venues, and Events

NOQ, a London-based technology company, has raised £3.5 million in a fundraising round including participation from Republic Europe (formerly Seedrs) and undisclosed investors to expand its mobile order management platform into new venues and events across the UK and internationally. The company has developed a software solution that allows visitors at stadiums, arenas, festivals, and other large-scale events to order food and drinks from their smartphones — removing the need to queue at concession stands and enabling venues to serve more customers, process larger orders, and collect data on consumer behaviour that was previously invisible.

The problem NOQ is solving is familiar to anyone who has attended a large-scale live event: the experience of spending a significant portion of the show standing in a queue at a food and drink stand, missing the event in the process, and making a suboptimal purchasing decision under time pressure. For venues and operators, this queuing behaviour creates a hard ceiling on per-head food and beverage spend: if a queue is long, attendees buy less. Peak demand is poorly distributed, staff are overwhelmed at interval and half-time rushes, and low-margin items — easy to order quickly — are disproportionately popular. Event operators lose revenue they would otherwise capture if the friction of ordering were lower.

NOQ's platform replaces this with a mobile-first ordering experience. Visitors scan a QR code at their seat or concession area, browse the full menu, and order and pay directly from their phone. Orders are sent to the kitchen or bar in real time, with the platform managing order routing, preparation queuing, and pickup or delivery coordination. This eliminates physical queuing, distributes demand more evenly across the event, and enables operators to upsell, personalise offers, and capture loyalty data. For venues running multiple events across different sports, concerts, and seasonal programmes, NOQ's data layer provides aggregated consumer insights that can inform everything from menu design to staffing levels.

The platform had already been deployed at a range of UK sports and entertainment venues at the time of the raise. The funding will be used to expand the commercial team, support deployments at new clients across UK sport and live entertainment, and develop the platform's capabilities in areas including pre-event ordering, suite and hospitality services, and international market entry.

Sources

• NOQ — company website
• Crunchbase — NOQ company profile