Dutch payments firm Adyen now has a market cap of over $61 billion, but that didn’t stop its cofounder Arnout Schuijff from stepping down in 2021 to focus on his new startup, Tebi.
Now an Amsterdam-based fintech startup with 35 employees, Tebi helps restaurants, bars and other hospitality businesses manage their operations with an all-in-one subscription-based platform that can handle payments, reservations, inventory, and more.
This means that Tebi has a wealth of competitors, from POS systems to reservation platforms and analytics-driven solutions for inventory optimization. But it hopes to have an advantage by tying this all together with enterprise-level functionalities and pricing.
To a casual observer, this appears as something that Adyen could have done. But given its focus on enterprise, building a product for SMBs was better done on the outside, Schuijff said. “That was a much more logical step for me than to try and do it within the context of Adyen.”
However, Tebi wasn’t meant to fill a gap left by Adyen. Nor was it meant to find a new role for Schuijff, who had stayed in his CTO role after the 2018 IPO that made him a billionaire, at least on paper. “My move was really a positive one. I didn’t need to go. I was still enjoying my job,” he recalled.
What he was missing, though, was coding; and this impulse to code was how Tebi was born. During Covid lockdown, Schuijff decided to revisit his attempt to make it easier for his favorite bar to handle value-added tax (VAT) and other reporting hassles.
On a tech level, this was similar to the accounting platform he built for Adyen, and before that, for Bibit, which then RBS-owned Worldpay acquired in 2004. But by 2020, Schuijff had more tools at his disposal. Using streaming, he was able to support instant transaction updates — and it grabbed him.
From side project to company
While this isn’t the case in the Netherlands yet, “you see a move towards tax departments requiring hospitality businesses to report instantly when the sale is happening,” Schuijff said. But more generally, he saw the need for less manual reconciliation work. This was also confirmed to him by bar owner Mazdak Nasori, who became one of Tebi’s five cofounders.
Eventually, Schuijff told Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does he would leave to focus on Tebi full-time. But his goal wasn’t to build another Bibit or Adyen, and still isn’t. “It was just that I got so inspired by the coding and by the opportunity to contribute something to society in another way by helping out a lot of local business owners,” Schuijff told TechCrunch.
As Tebi’s CEO, Schuijff’s role doesn’t involve much programming, and the irony isn’t lost on him. “I miss doing the coding, but then I figured out that I could add more value and increase the success chances of Tebi by actually doing what a CEO is supposed to be doing, which is building the team and many other aspects, helping with the strategy and all these things.”
One of these things is sales. When he goes out to eat or have a drink, Schuijff can’t help talking to owners about their pain points, checking what they are using, and introducing Tebi. “I consider I am doing them a favor, almost,” he laughed.
Still, joining forces with former Adyen EVP Technology Rob Vonk as Tebi’s CTO made for a tech-heavy team that needed balancing, Schuijff said. So he also hired Aki Tas as COO, who was formerly head of business strategy and operations at Notion, and recruited Patrick Studeneer, as CCO, formerly COO at Wolt. “Now we managed to level out the boat and start focusing much more on the commercial side and the expansion side.”
Means for expansion
After using a hyperlocal deployment approach Tebi is now available across the Netherlands, where it says merchants are already processing nine figures of payments annually on the platform. With open roles in Amsterdam and London and plans to double its headcount by the end of the year, its next step is to start serving the U.K. market, followed by “many countries in the coming years,” Schuijff said.
This rollout will be supported by funding. Eight months after raising a €20 million Series A led by Index Ventures (approximately $22 million), Tebi has now closed a €30 million investment (approximately $34 million.) Led by CapitalG, Google parent Alphabet’s growth fund, with participation from Index, it brings its total funding to €56 million (about $64 million).
Although San Francisco-based, CapitalG partner Alex Nichols is a really-thesis driven investor who also has Europe on his radar. He recently led a deal into Belgian startup Odoo, which joined a portfolio that already includes Monzo and Pennylane. He sought out Tebi after observing that European SMBs are underserved by costly, bank-dominated payment solutions.
“This setup closely resembles the U.S. market 15 years ago before the rise of software-embedded payments reduced bank share to less than 30%” he told TechCrunch in a written comment.
That Nichols had done his research was what ultimately won CapitalG the deal, in addition to all the “touch points” between Tebi and Alphabet properties such as Android, Gemini, Google Cloud and Google Maps. “We were not looking for an investment, but we thought, yeah, this is they’re bringing much more than just money,” Schuijff said.
The money in question will fund more than Tebi’s international expansion. It will also let it add more AI features, in addition to what it already implemented for onboarding to automatically pull menu, visual identity and reservation settings. “The future vision,” Schuijff said, is that on top of its all-in-one platform, there will be “an AI platform that will help you run your business better.”
Building this vision and expanding across Europe will take Tebi’s bandwidth for a while. But after that, and “as soon as we are confident that we can grab a significant part of the market there,” a U.S. expansion is in the cards.
