Vienna-based Orderlion raises circa €4 million in fresh funding to make the global B2B food supply chain more scalable
The funding will be utilized for international expansion, growing the team, and extending the company’s product line-up.
Orderlion announces the successful closing of circa €4 million in pre-Series A funding, including a mix of equity and debt financing, bringing the total amount of investments raised to €7.5 million since the company’s inception.
The new investment round was led by a European restaurant technology investment firm 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.
seed + speed Ventures is a pre-seed and seed investor focusing on B2B and enterprise software startups in the GSA region. The VC invests in teams of visionary founders with promising ideas for the future. In recent years, the portfolio of the Berlin-based fund has grown to over 50 companies with investments in fintech, supply chain, cybersecurity, sustainability, mobility and other software verticals.
Rockstart is an early-stage investor that empowers purpose-driven founders across three domains: Energy, AgriFood and Emerging Technologies. Rockstart invests in early-stage startups and provides access to capital, market, and expertise by connecting founders with co-investors, mentors, partners, corporates and the more comprehensive Rockstart network.
Rockstart has invested in more than 300 startups, and its alumni value is more than €1bn. Rockstart is an international team of 45+ professionals dedicated to empowering purpose-driven founders to become scalable and drive positive change on a global scale. Rockstart has notable exits such as Wercker, Bouw7, iClinic, and in 2021, 3D Hubs and Brincr. The company has offices in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Copenhagen, Denmark and Bogota, Colombia.
Stefan and Patrick are two seasoned entrepreneurs scaling a really neat solution to help organise and optimise the restaurant sector.
Having experience selling wholesale to restaurants myself, I know first-hand how overwhelming it can be with orders coming in from email, WhatsApp, and telephone 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.
commented Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart
A SaaS eCommerce Operating System for a fragmented, under-digitized market
With their 10 years of sector experience, consulting industry giants like Metro and Transgourmet on the supplier side and international restaurant chains like Burger King and Vapiano, Orderlion founders Stefan Strohmer (CEO) and Patrick Schubert (CTO) saw first-hand how fundamentally flawed the food supply chain was and held back by outdated processes and insufficient use of digital technology. Founded in Vienna in 2018 to make the global B2B food supply chain more scalable, Orderlion is providing suppliers and wholesalers within the F&B industry with a B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to scale up their operations.
Even though the food industry is the largest in the world with a yearly transaction volume of €2 trillion, many suppliers and wholesalers along the agrifood value chain still rely heavily on older technologies, like fax and answering machines, handle daily orders from their customers and process them internally.
In a market 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 mobile apps for digital order processing, seamlessly integrating with suppliers’ existing ERP systems. With its growing range of features, Orderlion additionally allows its customers to, e.g. 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.
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.
said Stefan Strohmer, Co-Founder & CEO of Orderlion
Our solution offers this large industry an easy way to digitize 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 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 live in.
A positive impact on sustainability while strengthening SMEs in a shaken industry
Orderlion helps wholesalers and suppliers that serve, i.e. 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.
According to research by McKinsey & Company, companies that establish advanced supplier collaboration capabilities and leverage innovation tend to beat industry trends by about 2x in terms of growth and other metrics.
While other technology companies within the industry try to establish a marketplace-driven model, Orderlion has deliberately chosen a SaaS model to give F&B wholesalers and suppliers the tools they need to successfully digitize their business and to cater to their existing operational setups instead of increasing competition among them.
By improving its customers’ operations, Orderlion also supports them in reducing food loss along the supply chain due to wrong orders or unpunctual deliveries.
With its team of 30 Horeca and SaaS industry experts, Orderlion has established a highly capital-efficient business model with a growing GMV of more than €150 million. The startup’s product is currently being used by customers in four countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and United Kingdom) and has seen strong early adoption despite the COVID-19 crisis that continues to severely impact the global food industry.
The recently raised pre-Series A funding will be used for international expansion, growing the team, and extending the company’s product line-up. With a remote team spread across several countries and 10 nationalities, Orderlion is already well on its way to becoming a fully global company in the coming years.
We are impressed by what the founders and their team have achieved. Despite two and a half years of the pandemic, which hit their client base, the suppliers of hospitality businesses and the restaurants particularly hard, they managed to grow their business to more than €150 Milliom in GMV.
They added an increasingly international customer base and achieved outstanding usage rates.
Orderlion’s product works; it comes with solid and unique benefits for suppliers and restaurants and a lean implementation effort through frictionless and deep ERP integrations.
commented Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director, seed + speed Ventures
Additionally, you can read the interview with Stefan Strohme – “Orderlion, Startup Journey: from 0 to 1“