Restaurant SaaS allO secures $5M

Restaurant software provider allO has raised a $5 million Seed funding round to continue scaling into additional cities in Germany and Europe. The company has partnerships with major companies like Google, UberEats, Wolt, Lieferando, Stripe and was a recipient of the Red Dot award in 2023.

The round was led by 20VC, with participation from Keen Venture Partners, the NL Startup Fund, 20Product, 20Growth and notable angel investors including Claire Hughes-Johnson (COO, Stripe), Daniel Khachab (Founder, Choco), Dr. Martin Enderle (Chairman, Delivery Hero), Navid Hadzaad (Founder, Zapp), Mario Götze (German international football player), Pat Cummins (Captain, Australia Cricket team) and more.

allO offers them a digital end-to-end operating system so that restaurant owners only need one subscription to better run their operations, increase their revenue and streamline their operations.

It aims to build the European counterpart to Toast in the US, starting with expansion in Germany, one of the continent’s largest markets, before expanding across Europe. allO currently serves over 200 locations in Munich and over 75 percent of the Chinese restaurants in the city.

The European restaurant market is sizeable, with over a million restaurants and many of them ethnic owned. These businesses are inundated with the inefficiencies and high costs of using unintegrated hardware and software point solutions, hurting profits in a thin margin industry that is still battling post pandemic labour shortages. 

allO was founded by two immigrants and a former Wolt and Deliveroo employee. Cancan Liu (CEO) and Teodor Rupi (CTO) immigrated to Germany for their studies and were amazed by the operational chaos inside the restaurants where they met up with friends. They later teamed up with Benedikt von Lewinski (CCO), who brought industry experience leading growth for Wolt in Southern Germany and Deliveroo prior to that. They started with building simple software for these ethnic restaurants, often writing code at the premises whilst speaking to owners, managers and wait staff.

The team felt that these small to medium ethnic restaurants were especially underserved by existing software providers. Over the past two decades, there has been a large wave of immigration into Europe, with food being a source of income and prosperity for immigrants. The growth in ethnic owned restaurants also catered to the rising demand from consumers for dine-in ethnic cuisine, as well as the growing online delivery space. In fact, 70% of restaurants in Germany are owned by people with ethnic backgrounds.

These secular trends, a shared experience and an opportunity to enable restaurant owners to simply do better culminated in allO, a multilingual, easy to use cloud-based system that includes all the tools a restaurant owner needs to run their business better. allO’s growth amongst the ethnic segment, a wedge into a competitive market, is helped by partnerships with major companies like Google, UberEats, Wolt, Lieferando, Stripe, and Paypal. The company was also a recipient of the Red Dot award in 2023.
In the past year, allO has achieved a 10x growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 4x growth in their average revenue per user (ARPU). It is now rapidly expanding, serving hundreds of restaurants across Germany and launching in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf in the coming months.

Cancan Liu, CEO, allO, said, “We are on a mission to end the operational chaos for local restaurants in Europe. Our solution allows restaurant owners to focus on what they do best – providing a great experience to their guests.”

Harry Stebbings, General Partner, 20VC, commented, “Restaurant software in Europe is broken. Restaurants have to juggle up to 10 different software products, which are fragmented, don’t speak to each other and severely hinder productivity and bottom line for restaurant owners. When we first met the allO team, it was clear that their fully integrated solution had been built alongside their customer, for their customer. There is a real opportunity to aggregate market share for point-of-sale in Europe and this is by far the most compelling team going after this opportunity.”