Snoonu Acquires US Food-Discovery App BiteSight in First International Acquisition

Doha, Qatar — October 19, 2026. Snoonu, Qatar's homegrown super-app, announced on Sunday that it has acquired BiteSight, a New York-based, Y Combinator-backed food-discovery app that went viral on TikTok and briefly outranked Uber Eats and McDonald's on the US App Store. The deal was signed at a ceremony in Doha, and Snoonu said BiteSight's founders are joining its team to build out video-led restaurant discovery across its markets.

What the deal covers

Snoonu announced the acquisition on its official social channels, posting photos from a signing ceremony held under the banner "Snoonu Welcomes BiteSight." Neither company has disclosed financial terms.

In its statement, Snoonu Founder Hamad Al Hajri, on his X account, said: "Every big idea starts with a vision… and together we open new horizons for it. Snoonu acquires BiteSight, the American startup that has surpassed 150,000 downloads and reached No. 2 in the Food & Beverage category on the US App Store. We welcome its founders, Bernardo Porbuá Quiroga and Lucius McDaniel IV, into the Snoonu family to develop new features for restaurant discovery and give merchants wider access to reach people across the region."

Both named founders are joining Snoonu as part of the transaction, according to the company. The deal gives Snoonu ownership of BiteSight's product, brand and underlying technology, rather than a minority stake of the kind Snoonu has typically taken in Qatari startups through its own Startup Factory programme.

Who is BiteSight

BiteSight is a video-first food-discovery and delivery app built in New York, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. Its pitch, as the founders have described it, is "TikTok meets DoorDash": users scroll short videos and photos of real dishes from nearby restaurants, see what friends have ordered and rated, bookmark a running "hit list" of places to try, and then order delivery without leaving the app.

The app broke out in June 2025, when a TikTok video showing off the app went viral. Within 15 minutes it had pushed BiteSight to No. 18 overall and No. 2 in the Food & Beverage category on the US App Store — ahead of Uber Eats, Starbucks and McDonald's. The clips that drove the spike have since drawn close to 4 million TikTok likes and roughly 250,000 Instagram likes, and the app carries a 4.9-star rating from more than 1,200 reviews. BiteSight has said it saw 714% user growth and gained over 100,000 new users in the days after the video posted; Snoonu's own announcement puts BiteSight's downloads at more than 150,000 to date.

The company had previously raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round backed by Y Combinator and SurgePoint Capital, and was, until this deal, available only in New York — despite demand from users elsewhere pushing for a wider US rollout.

BiteSight's public profile to date has centred on CEO Lucious McDaniel IV, a UT Austin alumnus previously at General Atlantic covering restaurant technology, and co-founder and CTO Zac Schulwolf. Snoonu's own acquisition announcement names Bernardo Porbuá Quiroga alongside McDaniel IV as the founders joining the company — Falak was not able to independently confirm Porbuá Quiroga's prior role at BiteSight from public reporting at the time of writing.

Why Snoonu is backing it

Snoonu is Qatar's largest consumer tech platform, spanning quick commerce, food delivery and ride-hailing, and has been majority-owned since mid-2025 by Saudi Arabia's Jahez International, which paid roughly $245 million for a 76.56% stake — Qatar's first billion-riyal tech exit. Since then, Snoonu has pushed beyond Qatar, launching in Kuwait, and has backed Qatari early-stage startups such as HASIF, Sufra AI and Hired Valley through its own Snoonu Startup Factory initiative.

BiteSight marks a different kind of move: rather than taking a minority stake in a Qatari startup, Snoonu is buying outright a venture-backed, US-based consumer app with a proven ability to go viral with Gen Z audiences — along with the team that built it. For a delivery platform competing for the same younger, social-media-native users that made BiteSight's app-store run possible, the acquisition buys a tested discovery format and founding talent rather than building the same features in-house from scratch.

A wider signal for Qatar's ecosystem

Most of the cross-border activity in Qatar's startup ecosystem over the past year has run in one direction: global venture firms and funds — including Qatar Investment Authority's Fund of Funds — moving capital and expertise into Doha. A Qatari company acquiring a US, Y Combinator-alumnus startup outright, rather than the reverse, is a less common pattern.

It follows Snoonu's own path from a QDB-backed, Qatar Development Bank-funded startup to a company with the balance sheet — built in part on Jahez's investment — to shop internationally. For founders and investors watching Qatar's ecosystem, it is an early data point on what "built in Qatar, acquiring globally" can look like as the country's most scaled startups graduate from raising capital to deploying it.

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