52 Investor Questions, with Sample Answers

Freshly lets independent restaurants order from all their local food suppliers in one place, and pays suppliers on time.

I ran purchasing for a group of six restaurants and spent two hours a day on phone and WhatsApp orders. Every supplier had a different process.

The operating system for food purchasing between independent restaurants and local suppliers: ordering, payments and credit in one network.

Food purchasing is the largest cost line in a restaurant. A small take rate on a large, repeat spend compounds as each city fills in.

Restaurants order from 8 to 15 suppliers through calls, texts and email. Orders get lost, prices are unclear and invoices do not match deliveries.

In our interviews, chefs spent 6 to 10 hours a week on ordering. 1 order in 12 arrived wrong or incomplete.

Notebooks, WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets. Big chains have procurement software; independent restaurants cannot afford it.

We interviewed 74 restaurant owners and 22 suppliers before writing code, and 40 restaurants joined a waitlist from a one-page site.

Restaurants order for free; suppliers pay a fee on each order. The chef is the daily user and the owner is the decision maker.

An independent restaurant with 30 to 120 covers a day and at least 8 suppliers, in one of our three launch cities.

Clean orders mean fewer mistakes and faster payment. Suppliers on Freshly get paid in 7 days instead of 45.

Order history and supplier lists stay with the restaurant account, so the next chef starts with everything in place.

The chef opens a list of usual items, adjusts quantities and sends one order. Freshly splits it by supplier, confirms prices and tracks delivery.

Supplier catalogs are messy and prices change weekly. Our catalog matching turns a supplier price list into orderable items in under a day.

The weekly repeat order. 82% of restaurants reorder from a saved list every week.

Payments next, then short-term credit for restaurants. Both build on order data we already have.

Bottom-up: about 18,000 independent restaurants in our three launch metros spend roughly $25k a month on food. That is $5.4B of yearly orders; at a 6% fee, about $324M of revenue.

High density of independent restaurants and fragmented supplier bases. We can reach both sides with a small field team.

City by city, once a city has at least 40 active suppliers. Each new city reuses the supplier catalog work from the last one.

Suppliers moved to digital invoicing during the last few years, and restaurant staff now expect app-based tools. Both sides are finally reachable online.

A 6% fee on each order, paid by the supplier. Payments and credit will add revenue on the same orders.

6% today. Suppliers accept it because faster payment and fewer errors save them more than that; we will test 5–7% by category.

About $450 with a field rep. Each restaurant brings around $133 of fee revenue a month, so payback is about 5 months after delivery costs.

About 70% on fee revenue after payment processing and support, before field sales costs.

140 restaurants and 35 suppliers. $310k of monthly order volume, up from $90k eight months ago, giving $18.6k of monthly revenue.

91% of restaurants that ordered in their first month were still ordering after six months.

Order volume grew about 17% a month. Most growth comes from existing restaurants adding suppliers, not only from new restaurants.

Paid social ads to chefs. We spent $8,000 and got 4 restaurants. We moved the budget to field sales and supplier referrals.

Broadline distributors with their own ordering apps, procurement software for chains, and mostly the phone and WhatsApp.

Their app only sells their own catalog. Restaurants want to keep their local suppliers, and those suppliers will not join a competitor's app.

Network density per city. Each new supplier makes Freshly more useful to restaurants there, and each restaurant makes it more valuable to suppliers.

We would compete on supplier relationships and payment speed. Our catalog matching and order history make switching costly for both sides.

Field reps sign restaurants; suppliers invite their own restaurant customers. 38% of new restaurants came from supplier invites last quarter.

About 2 weeks for a restaurant: a visit, a trial order, then the first full weekly order.

Two more field reps per city and a supplier referral bonus. At today's rates that adds about 60 restaurants a month.

Depending on field reps. Supplier invites are cheaper, so we are growing that share.

I ran purchasing for six restaurants for five years. My co-founder built logistics software at a delivery company. We know both sides.

We worked together on a supplier pilot in 2023. I lead sales and suppliers; my co-founder leads product and engineering.

A head of supplier operations and two field reps. The supplier operations hire is the first one from this round.

Not much short of evidence that restaurants do not want this. The retention numbers say the opposite.

We burn about $60k a month and have 6 months of runway.

$1.2M of monthly order volume by month 12 and $3M by month 24, from three cities, at a 6% fee.

60 new restaurants a month, suppliers per restaurant rising from 4 to 6, and retention staying near today's level.

At about $1.5M of monthly order volume, which the plan reaches around month 15.

$2M, which with planned hires gives about 24 months of runway.

50% field sales and supplier operations, 35% product and payments, 15% operations and runway buffer.

We are raising on a SAFE and are guided by comparable seed rounds in our market; we are happy to talk about terms once there is interest. See the guide on answering this question.

$1.5M of monthly order volume across three cities and payments live with at least 20 suppliers, which sets up a Series A.

Suppliers pushing back on the fee. We reduce it by proving faster payment and by keeping restaurants' order volume on the platform.

Losing a key supplier in a city before density is high enough to replace them.

We would focus on more suppliers per restaurant, which grew volume even in our slowest month.

The fastest-growing city is close to the density where growth comes mostly from invites. This round funds the push to get there.