The hospitality industry is still reeling from the aftereffects of the coronavirus pandemic. However, with lockdown now easing in the UK and parts of Europe, businesses such as restaurants, pubs and bars are opening up again. The Belgian SaaS scaleup Apicbase is helping these hospitality enterprises get back on their feet by simplifying the supply chain of these large businesses.
Apicbase has now secured a notable £3.44 million funding in its series A investment round. The funding round was led by Volta Ventures while the company’s existing investors Newion, AAA Fund and Business Angels also participated in the funding round.
The All-In-One SaaS platform
Founded back in 2017, Apicbase aims to transform how large hospitality businesses operate. With its SaaS platform that is touted to be the “most complete restaurant management software,” the scaleup says it can help increase food cost savings while reducing stock and wastage.
Apicbase’s services are cloud based, which means it centralises many kitchen processes to automate calculations, provide insights into big data, and predict purchasing volumes. This is all done regardless of the number of locations or concepts a business manages. In an interview with UKTN, the company’s founder and CEO, Carl Jacobs, reveals more on how the company’s software manages everything.
“Apicbase collects all sorts of back-of-house data. This ranges from food and ingredient cost to order and inventory data. Utilising this swath of data, Apicbase’s bill-of-materials functionality can calculate the needed orders for very large menus in seconds. It also takes historic sales data and current inventory levels into account and can even propose cheapest or most ordered suppliers. On the analysis side, we use this data to generate BCG Matrixes that actually tell you which products you should push and which you should kill,” Jacobs notes.
Apicbase also integrates with other platforms such as POS systems, accountancy, and payroll.
Deeper, relevant data-based insights
Running a hospitality business is no easy feat. To make the process easy, Apicbase performs direct integration with suppliers, for its customers. “For that we reach out to our customers’ suppliers and actually build the integration. So in a way, suppliers do sign up with us, but currently there’s no cost for them. We see this as a joint co-op with the supplier to provide the best possible experience for our end consumers,” Jacob says.
With this supplier integration, when users place orders or move inventory, the system notes it down. The food and beverage management platform offers an automated inventory system, which proactively enables customers to take note of “dead capital” that’s being stored in the company’s storage rooms, and thus take steps to reduce it dramatically. Jacob adds, “This leaves more room for investment and a healthier bottom line.”
Apicbase also offers a waste registration functionality. “This functionality allows customers to observe which food gets thrown out the most, which allows better ordering decisions while raising awareness amongst the staff, so that the food being thrown away becomes understandable.”
Improvements all around
The latest funding round for Apicbase spells major improvements for the company. The scaleup will allocate a major chunk of the funding to research and product development. “We will focus on UX improvements, enterprise grade features and last, but not least, AI & Machine Learning capabilities,” Jacob says. “Besides our product, we will invest heavily into marketing and sales as well.”
Apicbase is also set to expand to new locations with offices in New York, Amsterdam and London. Jacob believes that their direct sales model entails the company to be present in potential markets to understand its customers better. He says, “We believe having offices in our core markets gives our teams an advantage to show the value add of a product driven company as ours.”
The Apicbase team currently consists of 40 people and it is planning to add another 60 people in the next 18 to 24 months. “We’re looking for full stack, front end and back end developers, but also for sales, marketing and customer success profiles. We publish on multiple platforms but if people are interested they can always have a look on get.apicbase.com/careers,” Jacob concludes.
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