Bestie Bite raises $700K to reinvent restaurant choices with AI gamification

Bestie Bite, an app focused on authentic video reviews for the hospitality sector, has closed a $700,000 funding round. The funding, raised mainly through SAFE instruments, was led by Techstars. Investors include Zooga VC, Mamba Ventures, and several Italian and international business angels, among them Christian Marcon, Angelo La Rocca, and Claudio Vaccaro.

Founded in Rome in 2024 by Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo (CEO) and Caterina Vertefeuille (COO), the startup aims to simplify restaurant discovery for users and make marketing more accessible for hospitality businesses.

The company targets a common challenge in choosing venues: unreliable text reviews, fragmented information, and content heavily influenced by sponsorships and influencers.

By applying AI to the hospitality sector, the app helps users discover restaurants, bars, and hotels through short, real videos created by everyday customers, supported by a cashback and gamification system that encourages honest sharing of experiences, whether positive or negative, as long as they are authentic.

We built Bestie Bite starting from a real problem we face every day: choosing a restaurant shouldn’t require luck or hours spent reading unreliable reviews. This round allows us to accelerate a revolution already in motion: restoring authenticity to dining experiences and giving every restaurant simple tools to communicate with transparency,

says Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo.

For hospitality businesses, this authentic content becomes a practical asset: the app acts as a marketing tool powered entirely by artificial intelligence, collecting real user videos and turning them into ready-to-publish social media content for restaurant owners, all managed via WhatsApp. The AI also delivers sentiment and performance insights to help monitor service quality in real time.

The platform has already shown strong organic traction, with over 70,000 registered users, 60,000 videos uploaded across more than 70 countries, and multiple viral spikes.

The capital raised will allow the startup to expand its team in product, engineering, and business development, as well as further develop AI-based features within the app. A portion of the investment will be allocated to marketing and growth initiatives, targeting restaurant owners and users in major Italian cities and initial international markets.