Orderlion raises €4m to make the global B2B food supply chain more scalable

• Vienna-based Orderlion successfully secures €4 million pre-Series A funding, including equity and debt financing.
• The investment round was led by a new European VC fund with a focus on food technology that is currently in stealth mode alongside Rockstart and also saw participation from German early-stage investor seed + speed Ventures, amongst others.
• The funding will be utilized for international expansion, growing the team, and extending the company’s product line-up.

Amsterdam, November 2, 2022: Rockstart, global early stage VC and accelerator, announces its co-investment in Orderlion, a Rockstart AgriFood portfolio company. The €4m pre-Series A funding, including a mix of equity and debt financing, brings 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 specializing in supporting innovators within the food and beverage (F&B) sector. Additional investors in this funding round include Rockstart, seed + speed Ventures, tecnet, and Gateway Ventures, amongst others.

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(CEO) and Patrick Schubert (CTO) saw first-hand how fundamentally flawed the food supply chain was and held back by outdated processes and insufficient use of digital technology.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 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. 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. 

A positive impact on sustainability while strengthening SMEs in a shaken industry

Orderlion helps wholesalers and suppliers that serve, for example, 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.

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 five countries (Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, and Austria) 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 of 10 nationalities, Orderlion is already well on its way toward achieving its goal of becoming a fully global company in the coming years.

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About Orderlion

Orderlion was founded in 2018 by Stefan Strohmer and Patrick Schubert with the goal of making the global food supply chain more sustainable and scalable. The Vienna-based company supports food & beverage (F&B) suppliers and wholesalers in digitizing their key business processes by providing them with an eCommerce operating system that enables them to work more closely and efficiently with their respective customers, including restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets. 

Orderlion’s technology offers its clients the possibility of digital and fully automated processing of orders through their own web shops and mobile apps as well as upselling features and customer support functions that are integrated within the one-stop-shop platform. With its B2B SaaS solution, Orderlion helps to reduce food loss along the food supply chain and to increase the economic resilience of its clients by enabling them to increase the efficiency of their operations. Orderlion is currently active in 5 countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and France) and processes orders worth over $150 million per year via its digital platform.

About seed + speed ventures

seed + speed Ventures is a pre-seed and seed VC focussing on B2B and enterprise software startups in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. As a lead- or co-investor, the firm initially invests up to €500k in promising young startups and supports the development of sustainable, successful sales structures through tailored sales coaching by its in-house sales trainers. Thus seed + speed actively adds value to the operational business of its portfolio companies to enable faster growth.