OrderEAT

The Uruguayan startup OrderEAT announced the closing of a US$2 million investment round led by the Chilean fund Chile Ventures, with participation from Driven VC, Seedstars, Add Ventures, and angel investors Sergio Fogel, Alan Descoins, and Avedis Boudakian, as reported by Forbes Uruguay. The term sheet was signed in December, and the effective deposit was completed a couple of months ago, but the company waited to have a solid business milestone before making it public. The data supporting the decision: the company closed last year with 400 schools in its network and today exceeds 600, a leap that took less than six months after almost three years to reach the first hundreds.

More than 250,000 active students use the platform, distributed across 10 Latin American countries, with Mexico as the dominant market, according to data published by El Cronista de México. ” The phrase is important because it contradicts the typical metric by which a Series A is judged. 🚀 Before seeking capital, validate the business. A community of entrepreneurs building with AI as leverage — without startup hype, focused on what works. Of the more than 600 active schools, about 350 are in Mexico, 100 in Argentina, 80 in Uruguay, and 50 in Chile, with the rest distributed in other markets in the region.

The company will allocate 90% of the capital to commercial expansion strategies, with the stated goal of reaching 2,000 schools in 18 months in the countries where it already operates. In parallel, it opened proof-of-concept trials in Peru and Brazil with a few schools and without accelerating. The team is growing at the pace of the network: OrderEAT started 2026 with 25 employees, hired 10 in recent months, and the goal is to close the year with 50 people on the payroll, according to Forbes Uruguay. On the table is a Series A that the founder projects to raise within 18 months, once the user base justifies the migration from a closed-loop wallet to an open-loop wallet.

The model was born as a SaaS for school cafeterias and dining halls, but today it functions as a closed-loop wallet: families load a balance that the student can only spend within the school, with configurable restrictions on daily amounts or types of food. The tool solves three problems at once: it digitizes payments, gives parents visibility into what their child consumes, and provides cafeteria operators with a point-of-sale system with menus, inventory, nutritional control, and real-time reports. The case of Oak’s Leadership School in Mexico City, cited by Forbes Uruguay, illustrates the effect.

Andrea Molina, administrator of two cafeterias using OrderEAT for two years, reported a 70% increase in sales with no changes to the menu or prices. Her calculation: payment per student went from two minutes to less than 20 seconds, and she saved about four daily hours of management tasks. For a canteen with 20 to 30-minute breaks, the speed of the line is the revenue ceiling. The product thesis is direct: if the parent has more control and trust, they spend more; if the cafeteria has real-time data, it operates with less friction. “We make the business more profitable for them, they sell more, work less, and waste less food,” Craviotto told El Cronista.

What opened the doors was not the capital, as the founder insists: “What opens the doors is not the round, it’s that the concessionaire next door is selling more and closing the cash register on time. That word-of-mouth among operators explains the last 200 schools much better than any investment,” he stated to Forbes Uruguay. The company’s history explains why this dynamic works. OrderEAT started in 2022 in Uruguay, when its founders were 18 years old and the company operated in about 20 local schools and three in Argentina. A first round of US$300,000 led them to leave university and move to Mexico in 2023.

“The official birth of the company is in 2023, not in 2019,” Craviotto told El Cronista, clarifying that the true commercial takeoff occurred upon crossing the Mexican border. That year they reached 40 Mexican schools and closed 2023 with 100 across Mexico, Uruguay, and Argentina. Last year, 70% of the investment was concentrated in Mexico, 15% in Argentina, and 15% in Chile, the market the company opened from scratch and which also ended up being the origin of the fund leading this round. OrderEAT is also using artificial intelligence agents to scale without inflating the team.