Saltz raises €20M to digitise how European restaurants buy ingredients

Saltz is a Lithuanian digital marketplace connecting professional kitchens directly with food producers and verified suppliers across Europe.

€20M Series A backed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Inovo, Lifeline Ventures and Change Ventures, plus angels Mantas Mikuckas (Vinted), Miki Kuusi (Wolt) and former Shopify executives.

Brothers Andrius and Tomas Šlimas co-founded dropshipping platform Oberlo in 2015, grew it past $1B in gross merchandise volume, and sold it to Shopify in 2017, staying on as Director of Product and in Marketing respectively. Supply-chain veteran Reinis Strodahs had spent roughly two decades in European restaurant logistics watching procurement resist digitisation past the point other sectors modernised. The three founded Saltz in Vilnius in 2022.

The Series A's angel bench maps onto the near-term job of cross-border expansion: Miki Kuusi built Wolt's restaurant-side relationships across Europe before Wolt sold to DoorDash in 2022, and Mantas Mikuckas helped Vinted scale a marketplace across multiple national markets. The capital is earmarked for new European markets, deeper product and engineering, and more than 100 hires by end-2026 across engineering, product, sales and operations.

Restaurant procurement is one of Europe's least digitised corners: a dozen distributors per kitchen, no central record of prices, no way to compare rates.

The founding team has built and exited a marketplace at scale before — Oberlo passed $1B GMV before Shopify bought it.

The angel investors' networks — Wolt's restaurant-side relationships, Vinted's cross-border marketplace scaling — match the expansion problem directly.

Perishables, strict time windows and fragmented suppliers are real barriers that kept incumbents out; cross-docking plus integrated routing is Saltz's structural answer.

Founders who sold infrastructure once pick the next undigitised middleman market: the marketplace playbook transfers, the ops grind doesn't — so they hire the industry veteran as co-founder.

As of the 10 March 2026 announcement, Saltz is using the €20M to extend the platform into additional European markets, deepen product and engineering, and hire more than 100 people by end-2026, primarily across engineering, product, sales and operations.