During his last year in high school, Matías Craviotto, Luis Pedro Carrero and Juan Rodríguez they became —inadvertently— three entrepreneurs aged 17 and 18 with great projection. The Uruguayan youth were tired of the long wait to get their lunches in the school canteen and they looked for a solution. That was how, in 2019, he was born orderEAT.
Is application digitizes the operation of school canteens and allows parents and students to order online, avoid lunch lines and eliminate cash handling.
This application is connected to a web management system, used by canteen and dining room administrators, through the automation of all administrative tasks. “Students don’t lose recess time; parents are aware of expenses; and vendors reduce the working day, it helps them sell more, and they avoid wasting food by being able to plan exactly how much they have to cook,” he explained to Coffee & Business Craviotto, who is 22 years old today and works as the leader and manager of the company’s logistics.
For his part, Rodríguez is the CTO of the company, that is, he is in charge of the development and proper functioning of the platform, and Carrero is responsible for carrying out the accounting and commercial activity.
The startup began to grow rapidly and spread through different Uruguayan schools, to a large extent, thanks to the support of different institutions such as AJE (Associations of Young Entrepreneurs), ANII (National Agency for Research and Innovation), Ingenio, Endeavor and the Uruguayan-Argentine Institute.
The three young people began by raising capital to develop the application, and they managed to reach US$ 5,000. During 2020 —in the midst of the health crisis—, they worked on the business model. For the following year, in 2021, OrderEAT was used in 10 Uruguayan schools. Currently, this application works in 32 local educational institutions.
Also, recently, the startup managed to reach Argentina, Mexico and Paraguay. According to Craviotto, in 2021 the technology company processed US$360,000 in its operations. By 2022 this figure has climbed to US$ 2 million.
The path traveled by the entrepreneurs captured the interest of different investors, and 2023 began with good news for the three 22-year-olds: OrderEAT managed to capture a pre-seed round of US$ 260 thousandwith capital of Uruguayan angel investors and two venture capital funds -either venture capital (VC), as it is known in the world of startups—.
One of these two funds is the one of Argentine origin MrPink, whose objective is to promote enterprises in Latin America and in particular in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay. the other is qualitasa Uruguayan fund founded in 2015, which, among other types of assets, invests in venture capital.
Entrepreneurs study extending the round preseed to US$500 thousandsince they managed to “get the attention of the VCs,” Craviotto detailed.
The creators of OrderEAT at 8 years old
The takeoff
“Growth has been very strong since we started operating in the post-pandemic period: in less than 12 months we multiplied the number of operations fivefold,” Craviotto said.
In this sense, the company closed 2021 with ten clients in Uruguay and 15,000 orders per month through the platform. By November 2022, the startup managed to be present in 50 schools in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguaywhich made it possible to increase the number of monthly orders to 75 thousand.
The plans
For next year, OrderEAT expects to consolidate in Mexico and Argentina and open operations in Brazil. Likewise, the entrepreneurs will begin to work on “the vision fintech —company that combines the fields of technology and finance— of OrderEAT”, a strategy that aims to give adolescents access to financial education, as well as the management of a virtual wallet that they can use both in their canteen or dining room and in other places .
The three businessmen are going for more and, as confirmed by Craviotto, the three businessmen They are going to start looking for a round of seed capital (the next step to preseed and the one before that of series A in terms of investment rounds of startups) for August of this year.
“We always like to leave the message to the youngest who are encouraged to undertake. Uruguay has an incredible entrepreneurial ecosystem, full of support and people who seek to empower startups and you have to take advantage of it”, expressed the entrepreneurs in exchange with Coffee & Business.
