Yooga wants its restaurant OS to be ‘Toast of Latin America’

Yooga, a Brazilian restaurant management system developer, received $2.3 million in seed capital. Gilgamesh, Apex Partners, and Backfuture joined SaaSholic in the round.

Vinicius Melo, Victor Sortica, and Cassiano Guerra Fernandes co-founded Yooga in 2017 and bootstrapped it for three years before raising $300,000 in a 2020 friends-and-family round.

Melo developed it from college waitressing. He wanted to create software to automate restaurant operations that anyone could use, regardless of tech ability.

Melo lived in a software house, like “Silicon Valley,” to learn to develop it. Melo met Sortica through a software house friend after requesting a developer.

Yooga software helps restaurants manage orders, send them to the kitchen, deliver last-mile, and manage inventory and cash flow. Helping customers centralize those processes is the goal. Melo said in an interview that the company can sign customers in a week and see results in two months.

The founders say Yooga wants to be the “Toast of Latin America,” citing Toast as a major influence.

“When we started looking around, we learned we were doing something similar to Toast, which was a good benchmark,” Sortica told .

Melo and Sortica don’t consider Toast competition because Brazil’s market is fragmented with hundreds of companies and customers. They said legacy software was not evolving fast enough to serve modern restaurants.

Melo noted that Yooga has over 6,000 clients and is growing. Sortica added that 60% of Brazilian restaurants don’t use software, and most clients used paper and spreadsheets.

Monthly subscriptions starting at $35 generate most of the company’s revenue. Yooga is also developing payment and professional service revenue streams.

With over 4 million monthly orders, Yooga processes $2 billion annually. The co-founders say it grows double-digits monthly. Post-money, the new investment values the company at $20 million.

Melo and Sortica will invest in staff and technology. Early new features include “tap on phone” and PIX payment solutions. These new revenue streams should double Yooga’s average revenue per user.

“In the last three or four months, we have had positive EBITDA and want to grow faster,” Sortica said. As a company, we’re doing well and didn’t need the funding—we’re not burning cash—but we understand the timing. Less people raising, we wanted to move forward. We want this category to be ours.”