Dutch payments company Adyen has a market capitalization of over $61 billion, but that didn’t stop co-founder Arnout Schuijff from resigning in 2021 to focus on his new startup, Tebi.
Tebi, an Amsterdam-based fintech startup with 35 employees, now helps restaurants, bars and other hospitality companies manage operations on an all-in-one subscription-based platform that can handle payments, reservations, inventory and more.
This means TEBI has a wealth of competitors, from point-of-sale systems to booking platforms and analytics-driven solutions for inventory optimization. But I hope that all of this will be advantageous by combining it with enterprise-level features and pricing.
For casual observers, this manifests itself as something Adien could have done. However, given its focus on enterprises, Schuijff said that building SMBS products would be better done externally. “It was a much more logical step for me than trying it out in the context of Adien.”
However, Tebi was not intended to fill the gaps Adien left behind. Nor was it intended to find a new role for Schuijff, who remained in his CTO role after the 2018 IPO that made him a billionaire, at least on paper. “My movements were really positive. I didn’t have to go. I was still enjoying my work,” he recalls.
But what he lacked was coding. And the urge to do this code was how Tebi was born. During the Covid lockdown, Schuijff decided to reconsider attempts to make it easier for their favorite bars to handle value-added tax (VAT) and other reporting hassles.
At the technical level, this was similar to the accounting platform he built for Adyen. Before that, for Bibit, which was acquired by RBS-owned WorldPay in 2004. Using streaming, he was able to support updating instant transactions.
From side projects to company
Although not yet in the Netherlands, “we see a move towards the tax sector that requires that we report to hospitality companies immediately when sales are happening,” Schuijff said. But more generally, he thought there would be less manual settlement work. This was also confirmed by Mazdak Nasoli, the bar owner who became one of Tebi’s five co-founders.
Eventually, Schuijff told Adyen CEO Pieter van Der he would quit to concentrate full-time on Tebi. However, his goal is not to build another bibit or adyen, and it is not yet. “It was just that by supporting many local business owners, I was so inspired by the opportunity to coding and contribute something differently,” Schuijff told TechCrunch.
As Tebi CEO, Schuijff’s role does not include much programming, and the irony is not lost to him. “I miss coding, but then I thought that by actually doing what the CEO should do, I could add more value and increase the chances of Tebi’s success.
One of these is for sale. When he goes out and drinks, Shuijiff is unable to talk to his owner about his problems, check what he is using, or introduces Tebi. “I think I like them,” he laughed.
Still, Rob Vonk is working with former tech EVPs in tech, Schuijff said, as Tevi’s CTO was created for a technical team that needs to be balanced. So he also hired Aki Tas as COO. The COO recruited Patrick Studener, formerly head of concept business strategy and operations and Wolt’s COO as CCO. “Now we managed to level up the boats and start to concentrate more on the commercial and expanding sides.”
Means of expansion
After using the Hyperlocal Deployment Approach, Tebi is now available throughout the Netherlands. Here, it states that merchants already process nine-digit payments on the platform each year. With their open roles in Amsterdam and London, they plan to double their staff by the end of the year, so the next step is to launch service to the UK market and “many countries in the coming years” will continue.
This deployment will be supported by funding. Eight months after raising the 20 million euro Series A (approximately $222 million) led by Index Ventures, Tebi will shut down its 30 million euro investment (approximately $34 million) led by the Google Parent Alphabet’s Growth Fund, led by Index, bringing total funds to 56 million euros (approximately $644 million).
San Francisco-based but capital partner Alex Nichols is a truly paper-driven investor with Europe on his radar. He recently signed a contract with Belgian startup Odoo and joined a portfolio that includes Monzo and Penny Lane. He looked for Tebi after observing that European SMBs were not adequately served by costly, bank-controlled payment solutions.
“This setup is very similar to the US market 15 years ago, before an increase in software embedded payments reduced bank shares to less than 30%,” he told TechCrunch in a written comment.
What Nichols did his research was that he ultimately won Capitalg The Deal, along with all the “touchpoints” between Tebi and Alphabet properties such as Android, Gemini, Google Cloud, and Google Maps. “We weren’t looking for investment, but yeah, I thought they were bringing more than just money,” Schuijff said.
The funding in question will fund more than Tebi’s international expansion. It also adds more AI features, along with what you already implement for onboarding to automatically pull menus, visual identities, and reservation settings. The “vision for the future” means that in addition to the all-in-one platform, there is an “AI platform that will help you run your business better.”
Tebi’s bandwidth will be needed for some time to build this vision and expand across Europe. But then, the US expansion has expanded to the card “as soon as you believe you can win a large portion of the market.”
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