Antwerp-based Apicbase, a hospitality tech scale-up, announced that it has raised €4M in its Series A round of funding led by Volta Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investors including Newion, AAA Fund, and various Angel Investors.
Volta Ventures provides seed and early stage venture capital for internet and software companies in the Benelux region.
The company reports that the capital will be used to further advance the functionality of the platform as well as recruit key personnel.
Food & Beverage management done right?
The Belgian SaaS company was founded in 2017 by Carl Jacobs, Julien Burlat, Kim Rothuys, and Pieter Wellens. It develops a food & beverage management platform for hospitality and food businesses, and claims to deliver strong growth rates. The company focuses on multi-unit restaurants, ghost kitchens, meal-kit businesses, and large-scale catering operations.
According to the company, the digitalisation of the hospitality sector is booming, and Apicbase’s platform seems to be an effective answer to this. With a 100 per cent growth year after year, the company says this growth did not stop, even in the year of the coronavirus, which was very difficult for hospitality businesses. And currently, restaurant chains, ghost kitchen networks, and large catering companies are using the platform to drive their back-of-house operations.
Some of its customers include La Place, Be Burger, Sodexo, Not So Dark, Citizen M hotels, and Tastyoo.
How does Apicbase work?
The company simplifies the supply chain of large hospitality businesses. It centralises the many kitchen processes in the cloud, automates calculations, provides insight into big data, and predicts purchasing volumes, regardless of the number of locations or concepts the hospitality business manages.
Apicbase forms a single source platform for F&B management and integrates seamlessly with other platforms such as POS systems, accountancy, and payroll. It also automates inventory management and allows its clients to purchase directly from their suppliers via the software.
Providing such services helps minimising the workload and reduces the likelihood of errors occurring for businesses. Besides, management disposes of a dashboard with accurate data to guide the decision-making process; specially to avoid waste and increase margins.
Pieter Wellens, CTO and co-founder of Apicbase says, “Today we are the product leader in our niche, and we want to consolidate that position through continuous innovation. Already, Apicbase can predict the purchases and production plans of multiple sites with great precision. But we continue to make the software smarter. For example, we are systematically rolling out additional AI features that incorporate more variables into the calculations for even more powerful forecasts.”
Capital utilisation
Apicbase says it will use the fresh capital to reinforce three product pillars: usability, forecasting through artificial intelligence (AI), and scalability for enterprise customers.
Carl Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of Apicbase said, “We are using the capital increase to grow the platform and solve the specific challenges of large enterprises. We are recruiting plenty of talent, not in the least additional developers. By the end of 2022, we plan to double the number of employees and open offices in New York, London, and Amsterdam.”
Back in June 2019, the company had raised €1.5M in growth capital led by Newion. The capital injection was used to expand the team to 50 FTEs, locally and internationally, to meet the growing customer demand. Newion Investments is a leading Amsterdam-based investor, focused on European business-to-business software start-ups and scaleups with a global ambition. The company was founded in 2000 and has invested in 70+ companies.
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