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Dutch payments firm Adyen<\/a> now has a market cap of over $61 billion, but that didn\u2019t stop its cofounder Arnout Schuijff<\/a> from stepping down<\/a> in 2021 to focus on his new startup, Tebi<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cThat was a much more logical step for me than to try and do it within the context of Adyen.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Tebi wasn\u2019t 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<\/a>, at least on paper. \u201cMy move was really a positive one. I didn\u2019t need to go. I was still enjoying my job,\u201d he recalled.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> acquired in 2004<\/a>. But by 2020, Schuijff had more tools at his disposal. Using streaming, he was able to support instant transaction updates \u2014 and it grabbed him.<\/p>\n While this isn\u2019t the case in the Netherlands yet, \u201cyou see a move towards tax departments requiring hospitality businesses to report instantly when the sale is happening,\u201d 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\u2019s five cofounders.<\/p>\n Eventually, Schuijff told Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does he would leave to focus on Tebi full-time. But his goal wasn\u2019t to build another Bibit or Adyen, and still isn\u2019t. \u201cIt 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,\u201d Schuijff told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n As Tebi\u2019s CEO, Schuijff\u2019s role doesn\u2019t involve much programming, and the irony isn\u2019t lost on him. \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n One of these things is sales. When he goes out to eat or have a drink, Schuijff can\u2019t help talking to owners about their pain points, checking what they are using, and introducing Tebi. \u201cI consider I am doing them a favor, almost,\u201d he laughed.<\/p>\n Still, joining forces with former Adyen EVP Technology Rob Vonk as Tebi\u2019s CTO made for a tech-heavy team that needed balancing, Schuijff said. So he also hired Aki Tas as COO,\u00a0who was formerly head of business strategy and operations\u00a0at Notion, and recruited Patrick Studeneer, as CCO,\u00a0formerly COO at Wolt. \u201cNow we managed to level out the boat and start focusing much more on the commercial side and the expansion side.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmany countries in the coming years,\u201d Schuijff said.<\/p>\n This rollout will be supported by funding. Eight months after raising a \u20ac20 million Series A<\/a> led by Index Ventures (approximately $22 million<\/a>), Tebi has now closed a \u20ac30 million investment (approximately $34 million.) Led by CapitalG<\/a>, Google parent Alphabet\u2019s growth fund, with participation from Index, it brings its total funding to \u20ac56 million (about $64 million).<\/p>\nFrom side project to company<\/h3>\n
Means for expansion<\/h3>\n