Tebi: on the side of independent businesses everywhere

Independent businesses give communities their soul. But many face difficult conditions and must close shop, only to be replaced by the dime-a-dozen food and beverage chains that we are all too familiar with. 

This problem is personal for our CEO, Arnout. In 2012, he was working as the co-founder and CTO of Adyen – a payments business that would end up handling millions of transactions a year, and go on to be one of the Netherlands’ breakout tech successes. 

When his friend Stef, who owned an historic Amsterdam bar, mentioned that he was asked to go digital by the tax authorities instead of keeping track of his sales in a stained paper notebook, Arnout, by origin a software engineer, welcomed the challenge and cooked up an app that let Stef take and record his customers’ payments.

Fast forward to 2021: Arnout is consumed by his next challenge. He gets a group together – bar owners, creatives, entrepreneurs – to join him in realizing the wider potential of his bare-bones app. Many of their friends and neighbors run businesses, and they bring cities character and create jobs. To help those entrepreneurs overcome their ever-growing list of challenges, the group founds Tebi.

The digitization of operational tools for independent businesses has come with a few growing pains and owners didn't have the same kind of access to high-quality, integrated solutions that large businesses can afford to build. So they end up wrestling with expensive software that isn’t adapted to their needs: Their reservation system won’t talk to the devices that take diners’ and drinkers’ orders, and many don't know how much tax they will owe at the end of the year. In the crunch years of the pandemic, many owners didn’t have real-time insights into their cash flow, and struggled to pivot to online ordering and contactless payments. These vital businesses were being sabotaged by the very technology meant to help them thrive.

Tebi is a platform as technologically powerful as an enterprise product, but relies on empathetic design to honor and center the needs of business owners and their staff everywhere. All the digital clutter was replaced with a single, real-time, integrated system, built from the ground-up to have the user-friendliness of the best consumer apps. It consists of different components: an accounting backbone, a system for recording sales, payments, reservations, real-time product and shift reporting, inventory management, QR ordering, and more – all accessible in the same place, even on your phone, and with the same fair, transparent pricing.

We’d like to bring Tebi to the neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn, the independent clothing designer in Melbourne, the family-run hotel in Rome. Just as some consumer fintechs have completely changed how people feel about banking, we believe independent business owners are long overdue technology that’s responsive, intuitive, and designed to bring them delight. In our experience, they are weary of partial solutions that require a computer degree to stitch together, only take care of a small segment of their business, lock them into a long-term contract and often gouge them on price to boot.

Bit by bit, by listening to our customers and aligning our interests with theirs, we hope to build out the operating system that can serve businesses everywhere. By empowering our users with intuitive, comprehensive technology, we're not just helping individual owners – we're safeguarding the future of the local establishments that give neighborhoods their character.

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In 2024, we raised a €20m Series A in funding to fulfill our mission to help independent businesses worldwide with an intuitive, enterprise-quality operational software platform. Read the press release here.