Last year when we met Rui Bento and Nuno Rodrigues – two former executives of Uber in Southern Europe who launched the ridesharing and food delivery company in Portugal – they told us about their mission to enable everyone in the city to enjoy dishes from their favourite restaurants, at home. While the concept of food delivery is well-known thanks to the likes of Uber Eats, Deliveroo etc, Rui and Nuno were truly thinking ‘delivery-first’, something traditional restaurants aren’t set up for.

Seeing the potential of these two highly impressive operators and the poor infrastructure many restaurants have in place, which prevents them from delivering to consumers, it was an easy decision for us to lead this €1M pre-seed round alongside Lisbon-based Mustard Seed MAZE which has also attracted a number of industry-specific angels including João Cepeda, Founder and President at Time Out Market Lisbon

“Food delivery and takeaway are a growing part of our routines and will become even more prevalent in the context of the current pandemic. It’s easy, convenient, and there are more and more restaurants available. However, not everything is perfect. Many of our favourite restaurants still don’t make it to our dining tables. And most restaurants haven’t conceived their food to travel across town inside a backpack, on a motorbike”, shares Rui.

Every element of the Kitch experience is designed from scratch — from the ingredients to the packaging – and the team is committed to leaving no trail behind its deliveries, be it by reducing non-reusable plastic packaging, implementing technology-based solutions to reduce food waste, or improving the energy efficiency of food production and delivery.

On the investment, our Partner, Sia Houchangnia, comments:

“The way people eat is changing, fast, and Kitch provides the infrastructure that will allow restaurants to adapt and thrive in this new environment while at the same time building a brand that will be recognized for best-in-class operations. There is a massive opportunity here to be one of the few businesses that define the future of food which is an extremely complex market to navigate. Therefore, it is essential to have an execution driven team that knows the space inside out. With Rui and Nuno, we know we have found one. They are exceptional, execution-driven founders, and what they’ve achieved in only a few months reinforce our belief that they can expand fast and be one of the few winners in this highly competitive market.”

The team will use the capital raised from this round to start developing and scaling its operations from Lisbon, connecting the city to its favourite restaurants through meals made for delivery, offering restaurants new avenues to develop their businesses in a delicate economic environment, and taking a first step to making food delivery more sustainable.

At the beginning of this year, we led the pre-seed investment into Paul and Gabriel, the brains behind Primer, the new Fintech infrastructure solution out to help supercharge payments teams. We’re thrilled for the team who within a few short months have gone onto raise a new seed round led by Balderton Capital and with participation from Fintech giants including Taavet Hinrikus, bringing their total raised to just over £3.8M

Paul and Gabriel met while working at Braintree/Paypal where they worked collaboratively across sales and technical solutions in pitching to global mid-market and large enterprise merchants. It was during this time the pair experienced first-hand the core challenges merchants face in building out complex payments systems, leading to the genesis of Primer in January 2020. It’s also where we originally met and got to know Gabriel — who spent some time with the portfolio as part of his role at Braintree — and we’re now delighted to include him and Paul as fully-fledged members of the Seedcamp Nation.

Payments is incredibly complex and merchants’ needs have become increasingly sophisticated over the past few years, demanding more from their overall payments solution which requires them to leverage a variety of PSPs, local banking relationships (such as SEPA DD), properietary payment methods (such as Klarna, GoCardless and WeChat) and other third party payments services in order to expand to new markets and offer the payments experience their customers demand.

Add to this a need to optimise for cost and authorisation (acceptance) rates, reduce fraud, improve user experience and adapt to macro changes in the payments landscape (PSD2 and 3DS 2.0), the demands on payments teams have never been greater and, as a result, it becomes increasingly complex for merchants to scale payments as they manage an ever-growing web of interdependent technical integrations across payments services. This can directly impact user experience + checkout, and critically reduce visibility of data across their increasingly complex payments ecosystems.

Co-founder Gabriel LeRoux comments:

“Fundamentally, this is an infrastructure challenge. We see ourselves as doing the work merchants would have to do themselves, but through a unified API and integration, and with sophisticated data and analytics tools to help them take control of, and supercharge their global payments strategies. We’re aiming to remove all technical burden associated with implementing and managing payments through a best-in-class, unified payments API and checkout.”

Our Partner, Sia Houchangnia, adds:

“The highly fragmented world of payments has become extremely difficult for merchants to navigate on their own. Through its unified API and advanced analytics solution, Primer allows merchants to scale their payments without all the technical headaches. It takes a special team to make the complex simple and with Gab and Paul, we immediately knew we had one. They are both hugely ambitious and bring strong domain expertise from their time at Braintree as well as the perfect mix of commercial and technical excellence.”

For more information on how Primer can supercharge your payments team visit primer.io