- Techshop Primo fund, specializing in B2B, announced its fourth deal backing the fintech Qodeup
- The company, accelerated in 2021 by B4i – Bocconi for innovation, has launched a software suite for independent restaurants and chains, allowing the clients to access dynamic menus through a QRcode and pay from the table
- The Italian Restaurant/Catering market is made up of 185.000 restaurants with table service, for a growing volume of €15Bn cashless transactions
Milan, 11th October 2022 – The Techshop SGR announces a seed investment in Qodeup, a startup offering a software suite based on QRCode for Restaurants, i.e., the Catering industry.
The suite includes two products: a dynamic and multilingual digital menu supplied as a SaaS, successfully launched in 2021 with more than 1.000 active restaurants as of today, and a revolutionary digital payment system recently released and receiving promising interest by the market.
Inspired by a few pioneering projects in the catering industry, Qodeup launched a fintech solution that allows rethinking the checkout process of a meal, enabling a POS for each table through a QRCode and a web app.
Fast payments improve consumers’ life: nowadays, a significant part of the available time slot for a lunch break is wasted during the check-out process. The shrinking of such slots is advantageous for the retailer too, who can focus on service quality and the tables’ turnover.
Qodeup offers a payment solution with a simple user experience for the consumer, which is dealt with via smartphone but not requiring a dedicated app. The payment could be split among the clients and is settled through Apple Pay, Google Pay, or any other credit card. The restaurateur can monitor and manage the whole process via his dashboard.
Italy is the sixth market in the world for catering. The cashless transaction value in 2021 reached €16.5Bn, quickly developing over the past years and expected to grow further, driven by digital smartphone payments.
Qodeup was founded in Brescia by Fabio Marniga, a serial entrepreneur, and Stefano Allegra, a software engineer. Accelerated by B4i – Bocconi for innovation, the company completed its first financing round in 2021: among the investors Bocconi University and a group of competent and passionate business angels.
The past 12 months’ growth path raised the founders’ ambitions, highlighting the opportunity for a much bigger financing round in 2022. The round we announce today is a €2.5M Seed led by Techshop Primo, alongside FoodBrand (Doppio Malto’s chain owner) and a few business angels with peculiar market know-how. Some of the previous shareholders backed the round, and it is still open for some weeks more to additional investors.
The round’s proceeds will be invested mainly into product improvement and to support the market rollout of Qodeup’s payment solution. The main target is independent restaurants representing 92% of the Italian market. Qodeup also delivers a solution for restaurant chains integrated with accounting software.
“The fourth investment of the fund confirms our strategic focus in “SaaS + Embedded Finance solutions” with innovative potential for business owners and with measurable impact for the final customers” explain Gianluca D’Agostino and Aurelio Mezzotero, Managing Partners at the Techshop. “In Qodeup we found an ambitious and competent team, highly attractive for investors, partners, and talents, all needed resources for this journey aiming to disrupt the catering sector.”
Fabio Marniga and Stefano Allegra, Qodeup’s co-founders, declared: “This Seed round led by The Techshop represents an important step for Qodeup. We will boost our investments in our software platform, attracting some of the best engineering talents on the market. We also aim to onboard the top restaurant chains in Italy and to accelerate our go-to-market towards independent restaurants”.
The new Qodeup’s BoD will be supported by an Advisory Board where the first representative is Massimo Della Ragione, ex-Goldman Sachs, today B4i – Bocconi for innovation.
Throughout the Qodeup deal, The Techshop SGR was assisted by Ughi&Nunziante law firm, a project led by Amon Airoldi. Qodeup srl counted on the LCA team, led by Stefano Giannone Codiglione.