Finnish startup secures €2.9M to expand digital platform for restaurants

Cluby, a Helsinki-based startup providing a digital platform for restaurants to connect with their customers, has raised €2.9M in a seed funding round. The investment came from Vendep Capital, Cluby co-founder Pekka Koskinen, and Wolt co-founder Elias Aalto. With this funding, Cluby intends to expand its services throughout Europe, aiming to help restaurants convert casual visitors into regular patrons by offering tools for customer management, digital product sales, and loyalty programs.

COVID-19 accelerated digitalization in the restaurant industry, leading to the widespread adoption of digital tools like table booking systems, food delivery apps, and event ticket platforms. Many large chains have also created their own apps to connect with customers. However, this approach is not cost-effective for smaller restaurants, bars, cafes, or nightclubs, which have essentially been limited to social media marketing, newsletters, or physical loyalty cards.

Cluby provides an easy-to-use and affordable platform on which restaurants and other venues can connect with customers, manage their customer registers, sell digital products like monthly subscriptions, tickets and VIP passes, offer member benefits, develop personalized loyalty programs, and create marketing campaigns to encourage repeat business. Everything is done in one centralized, easy-to-use app, which is also useful for restaurant customers, as they only have to download one app to connect with all their favorite bars, cafes, restaurants, and nightclubs.

Cluby’s founding trio includes experienced startup entrepreneurs Kalle Ek, Joel Leino, and Pekka Koskinen. Koskinen is especially known as the founder of Leadfeeder, which specializes in identifying sales leads from website visitors. A couple of years ago, Leadfeeder was sold abroad in a deal worth 180 million euros.

“We saw the market need for Cluby already 5 years ago, and we launched the first prototype in the summer of 2019. But then COVID hit the restaurant industry, and therefore us, really hard. For 3 years, we kept our team small and improved our product in a close relationship with hand-selected restaurants. In the beginning of 2023, we decided it was time to start scaling, and since then we’ve grown both our restaurant and our user base month-to-month. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved with our team so far, and we’re excited to finally expand Cluby to other countries in Europe,” says Kalle Ek, co-founder and CEO at Cluby.

Cluby’s innovative approach to digital customer loyalty has significantly impacted Finland’s restaurant market. In 2023, Cluby’s yearly growth rate was over 5x, and there are already over 500 restaurants in Cluby and over 100,000 users who have downloaded the app. This year, Cluby will start its expansion in Europe with the aim of becoming the category leader in every market the company operates in.

“We wanted to invest in Cluby particularly because of its amazing and experienced founding team with multiple serial entrepreneurs, including Pekka Koskinen, who led our portfolio company Leadfeeder to a successful exit with Dealfront. The second main reason is the market opportunity – there is a huge need in the restaurant industry for utilizing customer data. Currently, there are no effective tools available for restaurants. Overall, we see that the restaurant industry is becoming more digital and increasingly utilizing technology, so we see an excellent opportunity here. Additionally, all of Cluby’s customers we talked with praised the Cluby platform and stated they had gained significant benefits from using it,” says Juha-Pekka Arala, General Partner at Vendep Capital.

Cluby was founded in 2018 by Kalle Ek, Joel Leino, and Pekka Koskinen. It has 12 employees and has raised €3.2M in total funding.

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