Today, Orderlion has announced a fresh €4 million capital investment for its SaaS solution for the food and beverage industry. The Vienna-based startup is now replanning to step up expansion plans, making B2B food supply chains more scalable.
The global food supply chain is one that relies on many different players, is impacted by many different extenuating circumstances, and, is resultingly, a pretty complex system to manage.
Innovation in the global supply chain has generally been seen through the development of marketplace models that connect wholesalers and suppliers with businesses, but this doesn’t actually enhance the speed and efficiency of the supply chain process. Aiming to fix that is SaaS startup Orderlion which has just pulled in a roaring €4 million for its platform enhancing the food and beverage B2B market.
Stefan Strohmer, Co-Founder & CEO of Orderlion, said: “Given additional price pressure and the need to optimize 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. With our solution, we offer this large industry an easy way to digitize its processes, allowing our clients to significantly improve their operations without having to hire more staff.”
Funding details
The €4 million pre-Series A funding included a mix of equity and debt financing and brings the Vienna-based innovators to a total of about €7.5 million raised since their 2018 inception.
The new investment round was led by a European restaurant technology investment firm that is currently in stealth mode and backed by leading food entrepreneurs and industry players, specializing in supporting innovators within the food and beverage (F&B) sector. Additional investors in this funding round include VC firms Rockstart, seed + speed Ventures, tecnet, and Gateway Ventures, amongst others.
Stefan Strohmer: “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.”
The funding will be utilized for international expansion, growing the team, and extending the company’s product line-up
SaaS for an under-digitized market
Founded in 2018 by Stefan Strohmer (CEO) and Patrick Schubert (CTO), Orerlion was developed as a result of their first-hand experience with inefficiencies within the food supply chain. The founders built Orderlion with the goal of making the B2B food supply chain more scalable and sustainable.
Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart, commented: “Stefan and Patrick are two seasoned entrepreneurs scaling a really neat solution to help organize and optimize 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 optimize the relationship between supplier and restaurant.”
The platform provides suppliers and wholesalers within the food and beverage industry with a B2B SaaS solution which has been missing until now.
The food industry is one of the world’s biggest with a yearly translation volume of about €2 trillion. It’s one that encompasses wholesalers, suppliers, hospitality businesses and more. However, many suppliers and wholesalers along the agrifood value chain still rely heavily on older technologies, like fax and answering machines, to handle daily orders from their customers and process them internally. In a market that is primarily made up of locally operating small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), sector-specific software solutions that allow users to remove friction and lower costs are still rare.
Orderlion’s eCommerce Operating System enables SMEs along the food supply chain to set up their own mobile apps for digital order processing, integrating seamlessly with suppliers’ existing ERP systems. It additionally allows customers to easily upsell new and seasonal products to increase revenue on average by 35% and digitize their whole payment processing flow to save up to 95% of their process costs.
As a result, the Vienna-based startup is helping wholesalers and suppliers that serve restaurants, hotels or supermarkets to improve their business operations, enabling them to scale more efficiently. By using the company’s technology, SMEs that make up the global food supply chain can strengthen their economic resiliency and that of their customers by freeing up time to focus on other important business tasks.
By improving its customers’ operations, Orderlion also supports them in reducing food loss that occurs along the supply chain due to wrong orders or unpunctual deliveries.
The platform is currently being used by customers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the UK. With this new capital injection, the team plans to grow internationally and extend the product line-up.
Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director, seed + speed Ventures, commented: “We are impressed by what the founders and their team 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 Mio. € in GMV. They added an increasing and international customer base and achieved outstanding usage rates. Orderlion’s product simply works, it comes with strong and unique benefits for suppliers and restaurants as well as a lean implementation effort through frictionless and deep ERP integrations.”
