Munich-based allO has raised €1.4 million in seed funds. The round is led by the Amsterdam/London VC Keen Venture Partners, whose track record includes an earlier bet in the Amsterdam-based food ordering portal Takeaway.com, since merged into JustEat. Aside from Keen, the round is also backed by angel investors, including Delivery Hero chairman Martin Enderle.
allO wants to set itself apart from existing German restaurant management platforms. The startup cites a number of pain points – some of its competitors have priced in non-essential hardware, it says, or lock restaurants into multi-year contracts to generate returns.
Founders Benedikt von Lewinski, Cancan Liu and Teodor Rupi aim to strip away siloed kitchen software tools, replacing them with a single “gastronomy”-driven PoS wired to the eatery’s menu and live customer orders. Eating out is a busy sector for startups (just days back Tech.eu reported on a Spanish end-to-end restaurant bookings platform, CoverManager, and Vienna’s Ordelion is expanding its back-of-house kitchen stock ordering service.) But Europe is a menagerie of distinct national cultures and traditions, and allO thinks it has mapped out the needs of its German clientelle.
The founding team say they’ve also included a third-party app store that automatically ties in on-demand food delivery interfaces, including back-ends for the popular takeout courier Wolt, JustEats-owned Lieferando and UberEats.
allO’s also promising to support cash payments rather than insisting on restaurants using connected smartphone fintech POS terminals. It says cash still rules the roost in Germany even after COVID accelerated take-up of contactless payments, and the option to use coins and banknotes may prove popular with traditional food fronts reluctant to cover card transaction fees.
The seed money’s expected to aid allO’s German expansion, building on its current four-person headcount.
