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Tebi, the latest venture by Adyen’s billionaire co-founder Arnout Schuijff, is quickly making waves in the hospitality tech space. With a mission to simplify operations for restaurants, bars, and cafés, Tebi offers an all-in-one, real-time platform that integrates payments, inventory, reservations, and more.
Unlike Adyen, which targets global enterprises, Tebi focuses on small to mid-sized hospitality businesses, a market often overlooked by major fintech players. By offering enterprise-level features in a single subscription model, Tebi is solving fragmented systems with one streamlined solution.
After quietly growing in the Netherlands, Tebi secured a €30 million investment from Alphabet’s CapitalG to fuel UK expansion and AI integration. With 35 employees and rapid product adoption, Schuijff and his world-class team are redefining how local hospitality businesses operate and positioning Tebi as Europe’s next fintech breakout.
Why Schuijff Walked Away from a $61 Billion Company
Arnout Schuijff’s departure from Adyen may have come as a surprise to many in the fintech world. After all, Adyen was thriving, and Schuijff, as a co-founder and CTO, held a high-profile leadership role even after the company’s blockbuster IPO in 2018, an event that technically made him a billionaire.
But for Schuijff, something was missing: the joy of building and coding. “My move was really a positive one. I didn’t need to go. I was still enjoying my job,” he explained in an interview with TechCrunch. What pulled him away wasn’t dissatisfaction but rather a creative itch. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, he started tinkering with a tool to help his favorite local bar automate VAT reporting and financial reconciliation and that side project quickly evolved into what would become Tebi.
A New Kind of Hospitality Platform
Unlike Adyen, which caters to large global enterprises, Tebi is focused squarely on small to medium-sized businesses in the hospitality sector. In a market crowded with fragmented point-of-sale systems, reservation apps, and inventory management tools, Tebi aims to do something different: unify all these elements into a single, seamless experience.
Tebi’s platform streamlines a restaurant’s digital backbone into one interface. Payments are integrated with inventory, staffing, and customer reservations. Instead of juggling multiple disconnected tools, hospitality operators gain a solution that works in real time and scales efficiently with their needs.
Here’s what makes Tebi’s approach stand out:
- One Subscription, Total Control: From payments to inventory, reservations to reporting, everything is integrated into one monthly plan, eliminating the need for multiple vendors and platforms.
- Real-Time Transaction Streaming: Utilizing modern data streaming tools, Tebi enables instant transaction updates, resulting in faster and more accurate reconciliation.
- Built for Simplicity and Scale: Designed to work for a single café or a multi-location restaurant group, the platform adapts as the business grows.
From Side Hustle to Scalable Business
What began as Schuijff’s personal coding project soon gained traction with hospitality operators like bar owner Mazdak Nasori, who later became a co-founder. The need for real-time tax reporting and simpler reconciliation sparked a broader interest.
Schuijff left Adyen to focus full-time on Tebi, driven by the chance to help local businesses not build another payments giant. While he misses coding, he realized his value now lies in building the team and steering the company’s vision.
Assembling a World-Class Team
To complement Tebi’s strong tech foundation, Schuijff recruited experienced leaders: Rob Vonk as CTO, Aki Tas as COO, and Patrick Studener as CCO. This helped shift Tebi from a pure tech startup to a business-ready operation.
Despite his CEO role, Schuijff remains deeply involved in product advocacy, often chatting with bar and restaurant owners to understand their pain points and personally pitching Tebi as a more innovative solution.
Scaling Up Across Europe
After refining its product through hyperlocal deployments, Tebi is now live across the Netherlands. The platform has already processed hundreds of millions of euros in payments for local merchants. With plans to double its headcount and open new roles in Amsterdam and London, Tebi is setting its sights on the UK market next, with further European expansion to follow.
To fuel this growth, Tebi has secured fresh capital. After raising €20 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures just eight months ago, the startup has now closed a €30 million (approximately $34 million) funding round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth investment arm. This brings the company’s total funding to €56 million (about $64 million).
Why Alphabet’s CapitalG Backed Tebi
CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund, saw significant potential in Tebi’s mission to modernize payments for small businesses, a segment often overlooked in Europe. Partner Alex Nichols compared the current European market to the U.S. 15 years ago, before embedded software revolutionized payments and reduced banks’ dominance.
What set Tebi apart was its enterprise-grade platform tailored for SMBs and its potential synergies with Alphabet tools like Android, Google Maps, and Gemini. While funding wasn’t Schuijff’s initial goal, he said, “We were not looking for an investment, but we thought, yeah, they’re bringing much more than just money.”
The AI-Driven Future of Hospitality
Tebi’s roadmap extends beyond expansion. With new funding in place, the company plans to invest heavily in AI-driven features. Schuijff envisions a platform where onboarding is virtually instant already; Tebi uses AI to pull menu data, brand visuals, and reservation logic from a business’s website or past systems.
Looking ahead, he hopes to develop an AI assistant that proactively helps businesses optimize their performance, from staffing and inventory management to customer loyalty strategies. “The future vision is to build an AI platform that will help you run your business better,” he said.
U.S. Expansion on the Horizon
While Tebi is laser-focused on conquering the European market first, a U.S. launch is firmly on the roadmap. Schuijff believes that once Tebi establishes a stronghold across Europe and proves its value at scale, the next logical step will be to tap into the much larger U.S. small to medium-sized business (SMB) market.
With his experience scaling Adyen globally, Schuijff isn’t intimidated by cross-continental expansion. However, his priority remains grounded: serve European merchants exceptionally well before replicating the model elsewhere.
FAQs
What is Tebi, and who founded it?
Tebi is a hospitality-focused fintech startup founded by Arnout Schuijff, co-founder of Adyen. It helps restaurants and bars manage operations through a unified platform.
What makes Tebi different from other POS or restaurant systems?
Tebi combines payments, inventory, reservations, and staffing into a single, real-time interface, eliminating the need for separate software tools.
Why did Alphabet’s CapitalG invest in Tebi?
CapitalG saw Tebi as a rare SMB-focused platform with enterprise-grade capabilities, as well as synergy with Google tools like Android, Maps, and Gemini.
Where is Tebi currently available?
Tebi is fully deployed across the Netherlands and plans to enter the UK next, with expansion to more European countries in the pipeline.
What will the €30M funding be used for?
The new capital will support Tebi’s European expansion, AI feature development, and a doubling of its team by the end of the year.
Conclusion
Tebi is quickly proving that small hospitality businesses deserve world-class tech. Backed by CapitalG and led by a team of seasoned fintech leaders, the startup is creating a future where payments, inventory, and operations are unified under one intelligent platform. With momentum in the Netherlands and expansion plans for the UK, Tebi is poised to transform how local bars, cafes, and restaurants manage their businesses. For Schuijff, it’s less about scale and more about meaningful innovation, and Tebi is just getting started.
