Backing the reinvention of restaurant supply chains: Saltz
Back in 2017 during one of my visits to Vilnius, I met two impressive entrepreneurs, the founders of Oberlo, a dropshipping service that grew to over $1B in GMV, then recently acquired by Shopify, the giant ecommerce platform. The brothers Šlimas, Andrius and Tomas, had built a very successful startup and exited quite early. I could see then that their entrepreneurship journey would not end there and that it was only a matter of time before they left Shopify to find their next adventure.
It took them longer than they expected, but after a couple of years of experimentation with some new ideas, they came across Reinis Strodahs, who had spent 20 years working in the restaurant supply industry across Europe, serving many high-end hotels and restaurants. He had seen first-hand how the industry is broken: restaurants and hotels buy produce, that constitutes ~30% of their costs, through a complex web of 2–3 layers of intermediaries, who all add markups, complexity and obscurity to the market. Reinis had been hacking together a better solution — a marketplace.
When the three of them met it did not take long for Andrius and Tomas to understand the opportunity, and for Reinis to understand the ability of the Šlimas brothers (and the development team that had followed them) to build a much better product fast. The Saltz.app marketplace connects farms, fishing operators and regional suppliers directly with customers across 5 countries in Europe. Chefs order via the mobile app. Suppliers send one shipment for all buyers to the Saltz warehouse, where it is aggregated, sorted and shipped to customers within a few hours.
Andrius and Tomas funded the pre-seed round themselves, then started to look for the right seed investors. I introduced Miki Kuusi, the co-founder and CEO of Wolt (acquired by Doordash), who rapidly understood the opportunity, having worked closely with his restaurant client base for years. Miki's friend Petteri Koponen and Lifeline Ventures led the €3M round, together with the Illusian family office that Miki works with, as well as angel investors Mantas Mikuckas (Vinted co-founder), Rytis Vitkauskas (Partner at Dig Ventures) and former Shopify executives. We were fortunate to be the only Baltic fund to secure access to this round.
The business is growing rapidly and we are excited to follow these experienced founders into the world of restaurant supply chain.
Andris K. Berzins
