Soplaya, the foodtech startup that develops digital supply systems for the catering industry in Italy, has announced that it has completed the second tranche of its Series A funding round, which began at the end of 2023, raising an additional €6 million from investors and bringing the total amount raised in the round to €18.5 million. Investors such as Alkemia Capital, CDP Venture Capital, Il Fondo Linfa di Riello Investimenti and P101 are participating in the operation, confirming their confidence in the startup.
With the €3.5 million round closed in July 2020, the foodtech company’s total funding now stands at €22 million.
Launched in 2018, Soplaya is a digital and logistics platform that brings together all food and non-food suppliers in a single order, invoice and delivery, all in just a few clicks from a smartphone or PC. Soplaya operates in the online horeca distribution sector in Europe and currently has over 2,500 customers, over 170,000 deliveries made and an annualised turnover of almost €20 million. Gian Carlo Cesarin, COO of Soplaya (pictured with the team), said in a statement: “The company continues to grow steadily by 75% per year, and our entire structure and four warehouses are operating at a profit. The new business plan outlines a clear path to profitability, with the goal of achieving positive EBITDA within 18 months. thus completing the process of economic consolidation, thanks to widespread expansion in the geographical areas that have been opened up in recent years and the technology that has been developed and that we continue to implement every year.
Two years after launching its service for small and medium-sized restaurant chains, in addition to its service for independent restaurants, Soplaya now has dozens of customers who use the platform to centralise their purchases. Today, the service is fully consolidated: it allows users to manage all suppliers with a single click through a single order, a single invoice and a single delivery, while providing purchase data and the ability to delegate operations to their staff. The next step is to completely digitise all aspects of purchasing, from automatic inventory reporting to calculating food costs per dish, to integration with suppliers’ management systems.
“Our mission is to automate every small manual step along the supply chain and offer a new way to manage purchases for the hospitality industry, saving time and money and helping to improve the quality of working life for restaurateurs and suppliers, as well as making our customers happy by improving their purchasing experience,” adds Mauro Germani, CEO of Soplaya. Thanks to this round, we will be able to significantly expand the range of services we offer, innovating a sector that is still lagging far behind in terms of digitalisation: in Italy, a restaurant owner and their staff lose an average of 10-20 hours per week searching for products, comparing prices and quality, managing orders and payments using different manual methods, recording delivery notes and entering them into the inventory, rushing to the shops when products are missing, when minimum orders are not reached or when suppliers make delivery errors, and monitoring the total food cost per dish, retrieving data only when invoices arrive at the end of the month. All this without the possibility of effective delegation or control of the numbers. A critical situation that is no longer sustainable in a sector that suffers from staff shortages and needs accurate control of the numbers and entrepreneurial management to survive and thrive.
Soplaya is a company that is changing the rules of the game in one of Europe’s most strategic and least digitised sectors: the B2B agri-food supply chain. In a market still dominated by inefficiencies, it has built a scalable, sustainable and high-impact model that combines technology, logistics and data. Like Alkemia, we invest in companies that don’t just grow, but know how to profoundly transform the dynamics of the sectors in which they operate. This round marks not only a step towards consolidation, but also the beginning of a new phase of growth, in which Soplaya will be able to accelerate the technological integration of the entire supply chain, thanks in part to the advanced use of artificial intelligence,” comments Giacomo Picchetto, managing partner of Alkemia.
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