Tebi, the new startup by Adyen’s departed co-founder, raises a fresh €30M from Alphabet’s CapitalG

Summary

Dutch payments firm Adyen now has a market cap of over $61 billion, but that didn’t stop its co-founder Arnout Schuijff from stepping down in 2021 to focus on his new startup, Tebi. 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. 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. 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. “That was a much more logical step for me than to try and do it within the context of Adyen.” However, Tebi wasn’t 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, at least on paper. “My move was really a positive one. I didn’t need to go. I was still enjoying my job,” he recalled. 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. 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 acquired in 2004. But by 2020, Schuijff had more tools at his disposal. Using streaming, he was able to support instant transaction updates — and it grabbed him. From side project to company While this isn’t the case in the Netherlands yet, “you see a move towards tax departments requiring hospitality businesses to report inst...