Vienna-based startup Orderlion raises $4m funding to scale the global B2B food supply chain

Vienna-based startup Orderlion announced the successful closing of $4 million in preSeries 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 that is currently in stealth mode and backed by leading food entrepreneurs 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, Co-founder and CEO of Orderlion: ''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. 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.''

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(CEO) and Patrick Schubert (CTO) saw first-hand how fundamentally flawed the food supply chain was and held back by outdated processes and insufficient use of digital technology.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 with the goal of making 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 industry 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, 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 supplier’s 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.

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 that occurs 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 comprising 10 nationalities, Orderlion is already well on its way toward achieving its goal of becoming a fully global company in the coming years.

Mark Durno, Managing Partner AgriFood, Rockstart: ''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.''

www.orderlion.com