Spanish AI start-up Burger Index has secured $1.3 million in seed funding to expand its services in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. The funding was led by Flat6Labs, a leading venture capital firm in the Middle East and North Africa region, and included F Capital and Cosmin Manea, founding partner at Instashop.
Burger Index offers data analytics for restaurants, cloud kitchens, food brands and distributors, providing real-time market, competition, and consumer intelligence to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
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The platform allows F&B businesses to spend less time on strategy and more time on execution, reducing the risk of every decision and providing access to data at an estimated tenth of the cost of market research agencies or internal data-insights teams.
Burger Index’s CEO and Founder, Wassim Berro, said, “Without data analytics we wouldn’t be able to do anything anymore. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity, you have to have it, and if you don’t, you’re going to fall behind your competition.”
The company’s key selling point is its ability to acquire all the available F&B data in any market and generate insights in seconds. Burger Index is already available in seven countries across Europe and the GCC within four months of launch and plans to use the funding to expand its team and data coverage to include digital groceries and supermarkets.
Ryaan Sharif, general manager at Flat6Labs UAE, said, “Burger Index finds itself at the intersection of three exploding markets – data analytics, location-based services, and restaurant tech, which is projected to reach $342 billion by 2027.”
The Ignite programme, which accelerated the start-up’s expansion outside of Spain, allowed it to set up operations in the GCC, and now with the leadership of its round, the founding team can scale globally.
Hisham Samawi, chief executive at F Capital, added, “Tools like Burger Index help businesses go to market faster, and we are proud to support the team at this early stage in their journey.”
Burger Index’s customers include major brands such as McDonald’s, Nestle, Reef Technology, Allo Beirut, and Majid Al Futtaim. These brands use Burger Index to answer critical questions such as where to open their next location, what to price their smash burger, what the key takeaways from reviews are, and which salmon poke promotions are active right now.
The start-up’s AI extracts insights to help businesses make data-driven decisions in seconds. Berro noted, “We have an opportunity to leverage all of these data points and generate insights for the F&B sector in seconds.”
The F&B industry is highly competitive and moves extremely fast. However, collecting data in the F&B industry has always been a manual process, leading to business decisions on new products, pricing, promotions, and locations taking weeks or months to action. Tools like Burger Index help businesses go to market faster and make informed decisions in real-time.
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