Australia’s wholesale hospitality marketplace, FoodByUs, completed a $12m Series B funding round. The raise follows an exceptional growth period over the last year including record MoM revenue, a 200% increase in suppliers on the platform and doubling its team to 85 people.
What is the market offering of FoodByUs?
Founded in 2016 by Ben Lipschitz, Tim Chandler and Gary Munitz, FoodByUs connects SME restaurants, cafes and caterers with thousands of wholesale food and alcohol suppliers. The software goes further, fusing their ‘one-stop-shop’ marketplace with best in class procurement software features to help venues run their entire back of house operations.
In this way FoodByUs allows independent venues to search and compare thousands of products, with consistent pricing, no credit applications and access purchasing power normally reserved for much larger businesses. The business has thousands of clients who enjoy substantially reduced food and labour costs while accessing cutting edge features like accounting integrations with Xero, integrated payment terms, detailed reporting and more.
At the same time, food and alcohol wholesalers have access to an additional channel to market and in many cases FoodByUs accounts for a substantial portion of a supplier’s entire business. The funds raised will fuel FoodByUs’ impressive growth and its mission to become an essential technology solution for every independent hospitality business, right alongside other critical software like point of sale, rostering, accounting, reservations and more.
What does the capital raise mean for FoodByUs?
Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Ben Lipschitz said, “FoodByUs was built on the premise of improving the overlooked ‘back of house’ function within hospitality venues.”
“Procurement time and costs are one third of a venue’s expenses yet are often where the profit is made (or lost). In the past few years alone we have helped independent restaurants and cafes save close to $16 million in costs and 2,643,750 hours in time ordering.”
“Launching a wholesale food marketplace was a novel idea and it took some time to prove value for both sides – which we’ve now done. We’re now in a high growth phase and are focused on building an incredibly high quality software product, without which independent venues simply could not operate. We’re already the leading solution in our market, this round will help cement FoodByUs as the dominant hospitality procurement tech in Australia.”
What is the investor’s take on FoodByUs?
The Series B was led by Base Capital, a VC company that invests globally across all stages, from seed to listed shares, with a focus on marketplace and software businesses. The round also included follow-on from Macquarie Capital, which has invested in the business since inception, marketplace investor F J Labs, which is based in New York, and Trawalla Group.
Paul Rutherford, Founder and Partner from Base Capital, commented, “The leadership team at FoodByUs is exceptional and a leading factor in what drew us to the business.”
“We were also drawn to the combination of operating software with an open marketplace delivering an innovative approach to how restaurants and food suppliers manage their businesses. Supporting this is a very strong growth trajectory along with excellent engagement and retention of customers,” Paul Rutherford further commented.
