Getting a deal with on meals prices at an unbiased restaurant is a continuing problem for homeowners, and there’s a lengthy listing of startups, like MarginEdge, OneOrder, TouchBistro, PreciTaste, ConverseNow, Fudo, Proprietor.com, which have stepped with their options.

Zitti’s co-founder Dante DiCicco is coming at this drawback, however from a novel standpoint: as a restauranteur. He had watched his dad and mom’ Italian restaurant areas dwindle through the financial downturn in 2007–2008 and now was seeing the worldwide pandemic take an analogous toll on eating places.

Whereas opening a brand new location for his household’s restaurant and getting the entire meals suppliers located, that’s when it hit DiCicco that this course of wanted expertise.

Fortuitously, he knew slightly one thing about that. An government at Snap, main the corporate’s worldwide income progress, he leveraged that data and teamed up with Erek Benz, co-founder of actual property market CREXi, to develop Zitti to place unbiased eating places on an equal footing, technology-wise, with giant chains.

What resulted is a cost software program platform that streamlines the transaction between eating places and meals suppliers by cost, worth comparability and vendor discoverability instruments.

“Meals pricing optimization is the way forward for the restaurant enterprise,” he advised TechCrunch. “A lot of the rising expertise has targeted on ordering and stock administration, however what’s severely missing is the precise enterprise intelligence to assist eating places make smarter buying selections. That’s a giant a part of our mission.”

Zitti launched in March 2022 after taking in $4 million of pre-seed funds in late 2021. DiCicco’s restaurant and his household’s eating places had been the primary beta prospects.

Within the final two months, the corporate began charging for its product — $150 monthly, per restaurant location — and is seeing “actually good gross sales traction as we ramp up our gross sales efforts,” DiCicco stated.

“Our goal to save lots of the cash on their meals prices is greater than that quantity, and ideally many occasions over, so it’s been obtained extremely effectively,” he added. “We’ve already had a major quantity of conversions from our pilot group to turn into prospects.”

The corporate is now again with $3.5 million in a seed spherical co-led by Oceans Ventures and Serena Ventures with Crossbeam, its pre-seed investor, additionally taking part. In complete, the corporate has raised $7.5 million since DiCicco and Benz began engaged on the corporate in 2019.

The funding will probably be deployed into expertise improvement with synthetic intelligence and extra automation being added to the platform quickly. Certainly one of DiCicco’s targets is to have the ability to present pricing adjustments in actual time after which use AI to foretell how a sure product will probably be priced over the subsequent yr.

In the meantime, Zitti is at the moment targeted on the Southern California and Chicago markets and likewise sees Austin as an rising market, DiCicco stated.

“The following steps of the corporate are increasing into new markets, however we’re taking a city-by-city strategy,” he added. “That will probably be necessary as we construct density on each the restaurant and provider aspect in order that we will have extra market intelligence and subsequently extra pricing intelligence.”