Dutch payments firm Adyen now has a market cap of over $61 billion, but that didn’t stop its cofounder Arnout Schuijff from stepping down in 2021 to focus on his new startup, Tebi.

Now an Amsterdam-based fintech startup with 35 employees, Tebi helps restaurants, bars and other hospitality businesses manage their operations with an all-in-one subscription-based platform that can handle payments, reservations, inventory, and more.

This means that Tebi has a wealth of competitors, from POS systems to reservation platforms and analytics-driven solutions for inventory optimization. But it hopes to have an advantage by tying this all together with enterprise-level functionalities and pricing.

To a casual observer, this appears as something that Adyen could have done. But given its focus on enterprise, building a product for SMBs was better done on the outside, Schuijff said. “That was a much more logical step for me than to try and do it within the context of Adyen.”

However, Tebi wasn’t meant to fill a gap left by Adyen. Nor was it meant to find a new role for Schuijff, who had stayed in his CTO role after the 2018 IPO that made him a billionaire, at least on paper. “My move was really a positive one. I didn’t need to go. I was still enjoying my job,” he recalled. 

What he was missing, though, was coding; and this impulse to code was how Tebi was born. During Covid lockdown, Schuijff decided to revisit his attempt to make it easier for his favorite bar to handle value-added tax (VAT) and other reporting hassles.

On a tech level, this was similar to the accounting platform he built for Adyen, and before that, for Bibit, which then RBS-owned Worldpay acquired in 2004. But by 2020, Schuijff had more tools at his disposal. Using streaming, he was able to support instant transaction updates — and it grabbed him.

From side project to company

While this isn’t the case in the Netherlands yet, “you see a move towards tax departments requiring hospitality businesses to report instantly when the sale is happening,” Schuijff said. But more generally, he saw the need for less manual reconciliation work. This was also confirmed to him by bar owner Mazdak Nasori, who became one of Tebi’s five cofounders.

Eventually, Schuijff told Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does he would leave to focus on Tebi full-time. But his goal wasn’t to build another Bibit or Adyen, and still isn’t. “It was just that I got so inspired by the coding and by the opportunity to contribute something to society in another way by helping out a lot of local business owners,” Schuijff told TechCrunch.

As Tebi’s CEO, Schuijff’s role doesn’t involve much programming, and the irony isn’t lost on him. “I miss doing the coding, but then I figured out that I could add more value and increase the success chances of Tebi by actually doing what a CEO is supposed to be doing, which is building the team and many other aspects, helping with the strategy and all these things.” 

One of these things is sales. When he goes out to eat or have a drink, Schuijff can’t help talking to owners about their pain points, checking what they are using, and introducing Tebi. “I consider I am doing them a favor, almost,” he laughed.

Still, joining forces with former Adyen EVP Technology Rob Vonk as Tebi’s CTO made for a tech-heavy team that needed balancing, Schuijff said. So he also hired Aki Tas as COO, who was formerly head of business strategy and operations at Notion, and recruited Patrick Studeneer, as CCO, formerly COO at Wolt. “Now we managed to level out the boat and start focusing much more on the commercial side and the expansion side.”

Means for expansion

After using a hyperlocal deployment approach Tebi is now available across the Netherlands, where it says merchants are already processing nine figures of payments annually on the platform. With open roles in Amsterdam and London and plans to double its headcount by the end of the year, its next step is to start serving the U.K. market, followed by “many countries in the coming years,” Schuijff said.

This rollout will be supported by funding. Eight months after raising a €20 million Series A led by Index Ventures (approximately $22 million), Tebi has now closed a €30 million investment (approximately $34 million.) Led by CapitalG, Google parent Alphabet’s growth fund, with participation from Index, it brings its total funding to €56 million (about $64 million).

Although San Francisco-based, CapitalG partner Alex Nichols is a really-thesis driven investor who also has Europe on his radar. He recently led a deal into Belgian startup Odoo, which joined a portfolio that already includes Monzo and Pennylane. He sought out Tebi after observing that European SMBs are underserved by costly, bank-dominated payment solutions. 

“This setup closely resembles the U.S. market 15 years ago before the rise of software-embedded payments reduced bank share to less than 30%” he told TechCrunch in a written comment.

That Nichols had done his research was what ultimately won CapitalG the deal, in addition to all the “touch points” between Tebi and Alphabet properties such as Android, Gemini, Google Cloud and Google Maps. “We were not looking for an investment, but we thought, yeah, this is they’re bringing much more than just money,” Schuijff said.

The money in question will fund more than Tebi’s international expansion. It will also let it add more AI features, in addition to what it already implemented for onboarding to automatically pull menu, visual identity and reservation settings. “The future vision,” Schuijff said, is that on top of its all-in-one platform, there will be “an AI platform that will help you run your business better.”

Building this vision and expanding across Europe will take Tebi’s bandwidth for a while. But after that, and “as soon as we are confident that we can grab a significant part of the market there,” a U.S. expansion is in the cards.

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25), Apple announced a slew of updates to its operating systems, services, and software, including a new look it dubbed “Liquid Glass” and a rebranded naming convention. Apple was notably quiet on one highly anticipated product: a more personalized, AI-powered Siri, which it first introduced at last year’s conference.

Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, only gave the Siri update a brief mention during the keynote address, saying, “As we’ve shared, we’re continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. This work needed more time to reach our high-quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”

The time frame of “coming year” seems to indicate that Apple won’t have news before 2026. That’s a significant delay in the AI era, where new models, updates, and upgrades ship at a rapid pace.

First announced at WWDC 24, the more personalized Siri is expected to bring artificial intelligence updates to the beleaguered virtual assistant built into iPhone and other Apple devices. At the time, the company hyped it as the “next big step for Apple” and said Siri would be able to understand your “personal context,” like your relationships, communications, routine, and more.

Plus, the assistant was going to be more useful by allowing you to take action within and across your apps.

While Bloomberg reported that the in-development version of the more personalized Siri was functional, it was not consistently working properly. The report said its quality issues meant Siri only performed as it should two-thirds of the time, making it not viable to ship.

Apple officially announced in March it was pushing back the launch, saying the Siri update would take longer to deliver than anticipated. The company also pulled SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea off the Siri project and put Mike Rockwell, who had worked on the Vision Pro, in charge.

The shake-up indicated the company was trying to get back on track after stumbling on a major release. It also suggested Apple’s AI technology was behind that of rivals, like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, worrying investors.

In the meantime, Apple partnered with OpenAI to help close the gap; when users asked Siri questions the assistant couldn’t answer, those could be directed to ChatGPT instead. With the upcoming release, iOS 26, Apple has updated its AI image generation app, Image Playground, to use ChatGPT as well.

At this year’s WWDC, the company continued to make other AI promises, including developer access to the on-device foundation models, live translation, upgrades to Genmoji (in addition to aforementioned Image Playground), Visual Intelligence improvements, an AI “Workout Buddy” for Apple Watch, AI in Xcode, and the introduction of an updated, AI-powered version of its Shortcuts app for scripting and automation.

Meta is discussing a multi-billion dollar investment in Scale AI, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the deal value could reportedly exceed $10 billion, making it the largest external AI investment by Facebook’s parent company and one of the largest funding events ever for a private company.

Scale AI (whose CEO Alexandr Wang is pictured above) provides data labeling services to companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI to help them train their AI models. Much of that labeling work is done by contractors — in fact, the Department of Labor recently dropped its investigation into whether the company was misclassifying and underpaying employees.

According to Bloomberg, the company saw $870 million in revenue last year and expects to bring in $2 billion this year.

Meta was already an investor in Scale AI’s $1 billion Series F, which valued the company at $13.8 billion. Scale AI also built Defense Llama, a large language model designed for military use, on top of Meta’s Llama 3.