The Oberlo veterans taking on Europe’s restaurant supply chain raise €20M

Lithuanian food marketplace Saltz pulls in a €20M Series A backed by the EBRD, Inovo, Lifeline, and a roster of Baltic tech founders, to digitalise how restaurants across Europe source their ingredients.

When Andrius and Tomas Šlimas sold their dropshipping platform Oberlo to Shopify in 2017, they could have sat out the next decade comfortably. Instead, after a few years inside Shopify, Andrius as Director of Product, Tomas in Marketing, the brothers went looking for the next broken industry to fix. They found it in the walk-in fridges of European restaurants.

The world Reinis Strodahs had spent two decades navigating as a restaurant supply veteran was, by any measure, a mess. Chefs at fine-dining establishments sourced produce through two or three layers of distributors, each adding markups and opacity. Paper order forms, phone calls, and supplier relationships that passed down generationally rather than through any transparent price discovery mechanism: not ...