Cluby, a Helsinki-based startup providing a digital platform for restaurants to connect with their customers, has received €2.9 million in a seed investment round. Vendep Capital is the lead investor in the round. The startup intends to expand its services across Europe and help restaurants convert casual visitors into regular patrons.

  • Launched in 2018, Cluby provides a platform through which restaurants and other venues can connect with their customers, manage their customer registers, sell digital products like monthly subscriptions, tickets and VIP passes, offer member benefits, develop personalized loyalty programs, and create marketing campaigns to encourage repeat business.
  • The startup’s founding team includes entrepreneurs Kalle Ek, Joel Leino, and Pekka Koskinen. It has 12 employees and has raised a total of €3.2 million in funding. In 2023, Cluby’s yearly growth rate was over 5x, and there are already over 500 restaurants in Cluby and over 100,000 users who have downloaded the app, according to the company.
Image by Cluby: Kalle Ek, co-founder and CEO of Cluby
Image by Cluby:
Kalle Ek, co-founder and CEO of Cluby

We launched the first prototype in the summer of 2019. But then COVID hit the restaurant industry, and therefore us, really hard. For 3 years, we kept our team small and improved our product in a close relationship with hand-selected restaurants. In the beginning of 2023, we decided it was time to start scaling, and since then we’ve grown both our restaurant and our user base month-to-month. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved with our team so far, and we’re excited to finally expand Cluby to other countries in Europe,

Kalle Ek, co-founder and CEO at Cluby, says.
  • The investment round was led by Vendep Capital, the Oslo-based VC firm backing early-stage SaaS software entrepreneurs in the Nordics and Baltics. Its first ticket usually ranges from €100,000 to €3 million.
  • Cluby co-founder Pekka Koskinen and Wolt co-founder Elias Aalto also joined the funding round.

Cluby will use the fresh costs to expand its services throughout Europe, help restaurants convert casual visitors into regular patrons by offering tools for customer management, digital product sales, and loyalty programs.