Katoo, the Spanish startup that simplifies and facilitates the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers, has closed an investment round of €3 million with several international investors, including Flash Ventures, Otium Capital and Marcos Alves Cardoso (co-founder and CEO at ElTenedor).
Just 1 year after the launch of its product, Katoo has built a network of more than 3,000 restaurants and suppliers that place and receive orders through its platform in Spain, Italy and Portugal. With this round, the team wants to consolidate its leadership position in these countries, increasing its customer base and investing in new functionalities of its technological product.
According to Diogo Cunha, co-founder of Katoo: “Raising external capital during times like this has been quite challenging. It proves that investors understand that more and more restaurants will be looking for solutions that increase their efficiency and reduce their costs – specially now. Over the next year, we will focus on consolidating our leadership position in Spain, Italy and Portugal, as well as continuing to invest in technology to better serve our restaurants and suppliers.
Katoo was founded in July 2019 by Diogo Cunha, Karan Anand and Carlos Esquivel, who came from multinational companies such as Boston Consulting Group, Uber and SGS. Their vision: accelerate the digitization of the hospitality sector through a very simple mobile application that connects restaurants with their suppliers.
Karan Anand, co-founder, commented: “We launched Katoo with the intention of offering a digital tool to restaurant owners looking to increase control over their business’ expenses. To this day, 99% of restaurant professionals continue to order from their suppliers by telephone, email, WhatsApp and even fax! With Katoo, we provide all kinds of restaurants, from traditional bars to groups of 30 or more outlets, with a completely free tool that allows them to increase control over what they are ordering.”
One of the big draws for investors has been the opportunity to solve one of the largest and still most inefficient supply chains in the world: food. Carlos Esquivel, CTO of Katoo, explained that “every year, 33% of food is wasted for different reasons – representing a 1 trillion euro opportunity. By simplifying the ordering process and providing information on previous orders, Katoo prevents restaurants from over-ordering, giving them a better view of each supplier. This financing round will allow us to add more intelligence to our platform and to be able to predict and calculate the optimal levels of stock based on historical orders to offer even more accurate data. In addition to offering standard interfaces such as EDI to further simplify the purchasing and billing process.”
Since the COVID pandemic began, Katoo has seen the average number of restaurants orders drop considerably – from an average of 12 orders per week to an average of 8, indicating a decline in industry sales as well. Faced with this situation, Katoo has created a series of analytical tools that many clients are already using to analyze and reduce their costs. In the coming months, Katoo’s team plans to launch more tools and services to help the restaurant sector in these difficult times as it did during the first wave with the launch of the #CuandoVolvamos initiative in Barcelona.
