Vienna-based Orderlion have announced they raised $4 million pre-Series A funds led by a new undisclosed European VC, Rockstart, seed + speed Ventures, Tecnet, and Gateway Ventures, also participated.
Orderlion, which was founded in 2018, is a SaaS platform providing food and beverage wholesalers and suppliers the tools they need to successfully digitise their business, meanwhile helping clients to reduce their food loss in the supply chain. Losses can occur due to incorrect orders or delayed deliveries.
The brain child of founders Stefan Strohmer (CEO) and Patrick Schubert (CTO), who combine their ten years of experience in the food and beverage sector with suppliers Metro and Transgourmet and restaurants Burger King and Vapiano. They pair are on a mission to fix the flaws in the supply chain and bring the industry into the current digital era.
“Given additional price pressure and the need to optimise their internal processes, restaurants are turning to their suppliers and wholesalers for more efficient and easy-to-use ordering options. For suppliers, making this transition has been hard, because they often do not have the resources, time, or technical expertise to take a generic solution available on the market and adapt it to their own business,” said Stefan Strohmer, co-founder & CEO of Orderlion.
“With our solution, we offer this large industry an easy way to digitise its processes, allowing our clients to significantly improve their operations without having to hire more staff. We are happy to be backed by investors with substantial industry expertise that are joining us on our path of making the global food supply chain more sustainable and scalable. It underlines the importance of our mission that we have embarked on, even more so during challenging economic times like the ones we are currently living in,” he said.
Orderlion is currently being used in four markets, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and United Kingdom.
“Stefan and Patrick are two seasoned entrepreneurs scaling a really neat solution to help organise and optimise the restaurant sector. Having had experience selling wholesale to restaurants myself, I know first-hand how overwhelming it can be with orders coming in from email, WhatsApp, telephone all with different lead times. Orderlion's OS for wholesalers simplifies this and we are excited to be part of their journey to optimise the relationship between supplier and restaurant,” said Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart.
“We are impressed by what the founders and their team have achieved so far. Despite two and a half years of pandemic, which hit their client base, the suppliers of hospitality businesses and the restaurants themselves particularly hard, they managed to grow their business to more than €150 million in GMV. They added an increasing and international customer base and achieved outstanding usage rates,” said Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director, seed + speed Ventures.