Vienna-based Orderlion lands $4M pre-Series A to make global B2B food supply chain more sustainable and scalable

The global food industry had a yearly transaction volume of over $2 trillion in 2021. The revenue from the food market alone amounts to $8.66 trillion in 2022. Despite that the food industry is the largest in the world, many suppliers and wholesalers along the agrifood value chain are still stuck with antiquated technologies like fax and answering machines, to handle daily orders from their customers and process them internally.

In a market that is primarily made up of locally operating small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), sector-specific software solutions that allow users to remove friction and lower costs are still rare. That’s why Vienna-based tech startup Orderlion is aiming to support 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.

Today, Orderlion announced it has closed $4 million in pre-Series A funding to accelerate its international expansion, grow the team, and extend the company’s product line-up. The round, which includes 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 and industry players, specializing in supporting innovators within the food and beverage (F&B) sector. Additional investors in this funding round include VC firms Rockstart, seed + speed Ventures, tecnet, and Gateway Ventures, amongst others.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Stefan Strohmer and Patrick Schubert, Orderlion’s mission is to make the global food supply chain more sustainable and scalable. The company’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, and United Kingdom) and processes orders worth over $150 million per year via its digital platform.

In a statement, Strohmer said: “Given additional price pressure and the need to optimize their internal processes, restaurants are turning to their suppliers and wholesalers for more efficient and easy-to-use ordering options. For suppliers, making this transition has been hard, because they often do not have the resources, time, or technical expertise to take a generic solution available on the market and adapt it to their own business.”

He also added: “With our solution, we offer this large industry an easy way to digitize its processes, allowing our clients to significantly improve their operations without having to hire more staff. We are happy to be backed by investors with substantial industry expertise that are joining us on our path of making the global food supply chain more sustainable and scalable. It underlines the importance of our mission that we have embarked on, even more so during challenging economic times like the ones we are currently living in.”

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 supplier’s existing ERP systems. With its growing range of features, Orderlion additionally allows its customers to e.g. easily upsell new and seasonal products to increase revenue on average by 35% and digitize their whole payment processing flow to save up to 95% of their process costs.

Orderlion also helps wholesalers and suppliers that serve i.e. 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