Restaurant tech startup Choice closes $7.1M Series A

The all-in-one SaaS platform for independent restaurants, processing 1.5 million orders a month across nine CEE markets, is now targeting Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Choice, the Prague-founded restaurant management platform that bundles ordering, payments, reservations, and marketplace integrations into a single subscription, has closed a $7.1 million Series A. The round brings total funding to $11.6 million and will fund the company’s push into Western Europe, starting with Portugal later this year.

Alea Capital Partners, a Lisbon-based B2B SaaS investor, led the round, with participation from existing backers Reflex Capital, Smartlink, and J&T Ventures. Alea’s involvement is a deliberate signal: the firm will support Choice’s scaling efforts across Southern Europe specifically, with Portugal serving as the first Western European beachhead before expansion into Spain and Italy. France, Germany, and the Netherlands are planned for subsequent phases.

Choice was founded in 2021 by Alex Ilyash, who previously built DAVINCI, a B2B SaaS hotel reservations platform serving 10,000 hotels across Europe, alongside Volodymyr Olyanitsky and Robert Novosad. The platform was originally conceived as an online presence tool for restaurants.

It has since grown into what the company describes as a full operating system for independent and multi-location venues: a website builder with a custom domain, commission-free takeaway and delivery ordering, QR menus, QR payments, table reservations integrated with Google, connections to the major delivery marketplaces (Wolt, Bolt Food, Foodora, Glovo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat Takeaway), loyalty programmes, and POS integration, all managed from a single admin panel, under one subscription.

That consolidation pitch is central to how Choice sells itself. The restaurant tech market is characterised by fragmented point solutions, each solving one part of the problem and generating their own separate data silos, integration headaches, and monthly invoices. Choice’s argument is that independent restaurants, the operators who most need to manage costs carefully, can replace that patchwork with a single subscription that also centralises customer data across every channel.

“We understand the fragmentation of the European restaurant market and the need for localisation. But we see this as a competitive advantage. We know how to scale in Europe. By combining strong local sales teams, efficient capital deployment from our CEE base, and AI-driven product innovation, we are confident we can win market by market,”  Alex Ilyash, Founder and CEO, Choice.

The numbers behind the raise

The company currently serves more than 30,000 registered restaurants, of which over 7,000 are paying customers across nine active markets in Central and Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Romania.

It processes over 1.5 million monthly orders, representing approximately €35 million in monthly gross merchandise value (GMV). Choice says it has doubled year-over-year and entered 2026 with around $5 million in annualised recurring revenue, a figure independently corroborated by Alea Capital’s founder Rui Escaleira, who noted on LinkedIn at the end of 2025 that Choice had reached $5M ARR and 7,000-plus active businesses and achieved breakeven.

“Choice is addressing one of the most pressing challenges facing restaurants today: operating efficiently in a highly dynamic market with structurally tight margins. By giving restaurants greater control over digital ordering, additional revenue generation, and a more balanced relationship with delivery platforms, Choice helps operators protect profitability while improving the end-customer experience,” said Rui Escaleira, Co-Founder, Alea Capital Partners.

Alea Capital is a multi-strategy investment firm founded in 2021 and headquartered in Lisbon. Its venture capital arm, Alea Innovation One FCR, invests €35 million into B2B SaaS companies with demonstrated product-market fit and a path to international growth.

Previous portfolio investments include Feelit (AI-powered industrial sensors, a round that also included Henkel Ventures) and Reckon.ai (AI-powered smart retail cabinets). The firm’s Portugal base makes it a natural conduit for Choice’s Southern European entry, where local knowledge and network matter for the kind of city-by-city rollout the company is planning.

The new funding will primarily go into product development, including AI-integrated modules, and sales and marketing in target countries. Choice plans to hire local sales and customer success teams in each new market rather than attempting to serve them remotely, a go-to-market approach that has characterised its CEE expansion.

J&T Ventures, the Prague-based fund that led Choice’s previous late-seed round in early 2024, continues as an investor in this round. Reflex Capital, a Czech VC also active in the prior round, and Smartlink, a Slovak fund, round out the cap table.