Adyen co-founder's new firm Tebi raises $22 million to expand

By Toby Sterling

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The co-founder of payments giant Adyen has begun scaling up his new business software firm Tebi, securing a 20 million euro ($22 million) investment from Index Ventures.

Billionaire Arnout Schuijff left Adyen at the end of 2020 to pursue the project he had been coding in his spare time: an app he once made to help a pub owner who had been using a pen and paper to record sales.

The core idea of Tebi, which has been growing in popularity in Dutch restaurants and bars from its Amsterdam base, is to help businesses take orders and process payments with what feels like a smartphone app, while providing a backbone of accounting.

"That is the core of this proposition, that it’s easy to use," Schuijff told Reuters. "It’s going to be simple and it will do it correctly."

The accounting side of the software gives companies a daily view into profitability, far in advance of formal reporting, which it also helps get in order.  

Schuijff describes business owners as pilots, with many flying blind and needing cockpit instruments.

"We feel the market is very much under-served," he said.

Like Adyen, Tebi plans to make money by handling large volumes of transactions efficiently. It runs on Android or Apple tablets and phones, and is free for firms with up to 10,000 euros in monthly revenues. Then it’s 20 euros per month for each additional 10,000 euros.

Schuijff’s first company, payments processing firm Bibit, was bought by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2004 for $100 million, while Adyen is currently worth 43 billion euros.

Index Ventures, the European-American venture fund, also backed Adyen and is expected to help Tebi enter more markets, targeting north-western Europe first.

($1 = 0.9167 euros)

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Mark Potter)