Yooga, which develops a restaurant operations management system based in Brazil, achieved its first institutional investment round of USD$2.3 million in seed capital.
SaaSholic led the round with Gilgamesh, Apex Partners, and Backfuture participation.
Vinicius Melo, Victor Sortica, and Cassiano Guerra Fernandes founded the company in 2017 and bootstrapped Yooga for three years before raising USD $ 300,000 in a friends and family round in 2020.
The project was born from Melo’s experience at university serving tables. He wanted to create software to help restaurants automate their operational processes and, at the same time, offer a product that anyone could use, regardless of their technological skills.
Melo even lived in a software house, reminiscent of the Silicon Valley TV series, to learn how to develop it. A friend from this place connected him with Sortica after Sortica expressed a need for a developer.
Yooga provides restaurant software to manage orders, send them to the kitchen, make last-mile deliveries, and control inventory and cash flow.
The idea is to help clients bring all these processes into a single platform. The company can onboard clients within a week, and in just two months, users are already seeing results, Melo stated in an interview.
The co-founders state that Yooga aspires to be the “Toast of Latin America,” asserting that Toast had paved much of the path the co-founders wanted to follow.
“When we started looking around, we realized we were doing something similar to Toast, a good reference point,” Sortica told TechCrunch.
Melo and Sortica don’t see Toast as competition because the Brazilian market is very fragmented, meaning there are hundreds of companies with hundreds of clients.
They explained that the legacy software needed to evolve faster to create something that could serve today’s restaurants.
Yooga has over 6,000 clients and is still growing, said Melo. Most of these clients were using paper and spreadsheets; Sortica emphasized that 60% of restaurants in Brazil don’t use any software.
Most of the company’s revenue comes from monthly subscriptions, starting from USD $ 35. Yooga is also working on adding new sources of income from payments and other professional services.
Yooga manages USD$2 billion in transactions annually, with over 4 million monthly orders on its platform.
According to its co-founders, Yooga is growing at a double-digit monthly rate. The new investment also values the company at USD$20 million.
“In the last three or four months, we’ve had a positive EBITDA and want to grow faster. We’re doing very well as a company and didn’t need financing”.
“We’re not burning much cash, but we understand it’s the suitable time. With fewer people rising, we wanted to move forward. Our goal is to own this category,” concluded Victor Sortica.
Melo and Sortica plan to allocate the capital to hire additional staff and for technological development.
Two upcoming features will be “touch on the phone” and PIX payment solutions. They hope these new sources of revenue will allow Yooga to double its average revenue per user.
