The startup, haddock, SaaS specialized in intelligent cost control for restaurants, closes its first year of existence with several milestones to celebrate. Among this, its participation in the acceleration program Silicon Valley Y Combinator. In this way, it becomes in the ninth Spanish company to access this program. In addition, it has recently closed a financing round of one million euros.
Haddock is a Software as a Service (SaaS) in Europe that works as a platform with which catering businesses improve the management of your company. Using an app that takes photos, companies automatically extract information from invoices and packing slips to provide up-to-date income and expense data in real time.
“We work with OCR technology by line item and artificial intelligence, this allows our clients to know the variation in the prices they buy from their suppliers. At the same time, it allows them to have instant control of their expenses with the digitization of invoices. As a whole, our tool allows restaurant managers to make strategic decisions at the moment with updated information in real time, before they had to wait until the end of the month to close the accounts”explains the co-founder and CEO of haddock, Arnau Navarro.
One million euros to reach more restaurants
Haddock closed, at the end of 2021, an investment round of 1 million euros led by Y Combinator and which has had the support of important investors such as Zone2Boost, JME, LevelsUp, Extension Fund and BAs, from the restaurant sector. Lourdes Álvarez de Toledo, partner at JME Venture Capital, states that “with the digitization of the hospitality sector and the boom in food delivery, we believe that haddock has appeared at the perfect time to simplify, centralize and digitize the management of expenses and income from the restaurant sector.
During this year, the startup has increased its workforce by 85%, exceeding 20 employees, and they have managed to enter the Portuguese market after going through the accelerator Lisbon “From Start to Table”. After months of development and consolidation, this injection of capital aims to improve the product and accelerate its growth, reaching more restaurateurs who want to improve cost management with a platform that presents data in an intuitive way.
The management application for the control of expenses in the haddock restoration already has the confidence of more than 200 clients in just one year. Some of them as well known as Flax & Kale, Guakame, La Taquería, Panchito or Miss Sushi, among others.
haddock emerged in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the need for improvement in restaurant management was detected. In order to help restaurateurs with cost control, the founders Arnau Navarro (CEO), Pol Rosell (COO) and Carlos Marchal (CTO), developed a pioneering solution that helps restaurateurs make decisions based on real data . After studying the market and its needs, they launched the first version in February 2021.
With the help of Shuttle, the accelerator of Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, managed to quickly scale the product and automate, through an algorithm, the reconciliation of documents. Functionality that allows discrepancies between delivery notes and invoices to be detected, thus improving the bargaining power of restaurants vis-à-vis their suppliers.
