Small businesses form the beating heart of our communities, yet running one is no easy feat. Beyond the already gargantuan job of managing their day-to-day operations, small business entrepreneurs work overtime to stay on top of back office tasks. In Europe the challenge is compounded by a tangled mess of lackluster, disconnected software that often creates more headaches than efficiency.

This operations challenge starts with payments. Sleek, tablet-based payment setups are ubiquitous in the US -- your barista selects your coffee order on the screen, you tap your phone, and within seconds you are on your way with a warm cup of coffee in hand. In Europe, however, legacy payment terminals, often distributed by banks, are commonplace and still handle ~76% of SME payment volume according to UBS research. Since these machines are not sold alongside modern software, adoption of the latter remains low: Only ~39% of restaurants leverage a point of sale (POS) application (vs. 95%+ in the US), let alone use one for reservations, inventory tracking or bookkeeping.

Beyond payments distribution, software adoption is further complicated by localization requirements; languages, tax policies, regulatory structures, and currencies vary by country and region. Hundreds of vendors tackle niche challenges in each country, forcing SMEs to stitch together bundles of point solutions, which are both expensive and a headache to integrate. It’s such a challenge that many small businesses decide to operate without a tech stack, despite wanting one.

The opportunity to empower small businesses owners is massive. There are over 1.5M SMEs in the food and beverage service industry in Europe, generating €500B+ in annual sales. Having no digital solutions or having data balkanized across systems robs operators of real-time business insight and wastes time. Fortunately, Europe is at the tipping point of a software-led payments revolution that will facilitate distribution and spur adoption.

Enter Tebi

Tebi has built an all-in-one operating system for SMEs that bridges payments and operations. Today, the platform encompasses POS, payments, reservations, kitchen display, inventory, and bookkeeping. Over time, it will address every important business function. The team is on a mission to make enterprise-grade software accessible to small businesses, providing them with visibility into key business performance and automation of key tasks like payments, reservations and inventory management for the first time.

The idea for Tebi was born at a local bar owned by Tebi co-founder and CEO Arnout Schuijff’s friend back in 2012. He hacked together a barebones workflow system as a “digital upgrade” to replace the old notebook that had long served as the bar’s sales ledger. A few years later, as he revisited the project during COVID to add a robust accounting backbone, Arnout realized that unifying payments with business applications could drive a 10x value proposition for customers. From completing a customer transaction to buying inventory and managing accounting, payments lie at the center of most of a business’s critical workflows. With a unified data foundation across each of these functions, Tebi can provide busy entrepreneurs with more powerful tools that are easier to use.

Visualize this: The moment a payment goes through, the sale is logged in the central ledger, and the day’s revenues update in real-time. Each evening as businesses close, instead of piecing together reports from a POS, a payments processor, and an inventory tool, owners simply open Tebi’s dashboard on their phones to see exactly how the day went – from total sales down to net profit. What used to take multiple systems and hours of manual reconciliation can instead happen automatically and seamlessly.

In addition to the efficiency benefits, bundling multiple software modules together also offers cost and ease of use advantages, both of which are incredibly important for SMEs. While the last decade of startups have been defined by best-of-breed point solutions, we believe that the next generation of SMB software will be defined by tightly integrated suites of tools. This is a thesis we have been investing against for years, from Odoo to Freshworks to Rippling to CrowdStrike.

Building For The Long-Term

We couldn’t imagine a better person to lead Tebi than Arnout. Beyond the obvious ‘founder-market fit’ he brings from his 20+ years of payments experience co-founding Adyen and Bibit, he is also incredibly thoughtful, intentional, customer-centric and focused on building for the long-term.

That customer centricity is evident in customer love for Tebi’s product. We visited over a dozen of Tebi’s customers in Amsterdam (including the bar where it all started) and heard consistent delight. From a Japanese takoyaki food market stall to a harborfront seafood restaurant, Tebi’s customers speak effusively about the company’s broad feature set, ease of use, rapid pace of innovation, and responsiveness to feedback. They also appreciate the customer friendly pricing philosophy which is refreshingly transparent and success-based.

Following in the footsteps of the “Adyen Formula,” Arnout has built a special culture at Tebi. The “Tebi Recipe” is a culture grounded in humility, emphasizing customer-centricity, a commitment to building with urgency, community responsibility, and effective teamwork.

We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Arnout, Aki, Patrick, Rob, and the rest of the extraordinary Tebi team. Even though Tebi is already processing nine figures of payments annually, they are only scratching the surface of their opportunity to build a generational business by empowering SMEs. We believe Tebi has all the right “ingredients” to become the most important daily platform for small businesses around the world.