Restaurant Software Company Nesto Raises €11 Million, Targets Operational Automation
Nesto Software GmbH, a Karlsruhe-based workforce management platform, has raised €11 million in growth equity from Expedition Growth Capital. The company manages scheduling, demand forecasting, HR workflows, and payroll preparation for more than 3,000 restaurant locations across Europe, handling over 100,000 daily employee shifts.
This is Nesto's first institutional funding round. The company was built without external capital by Felix Kaiser and Dr. Theodor Ackbarow, both engineers trained at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and reached €5 million in annual recurring revenue before approaching investors.
Expedition Growth Capital, based in London and Boston, invests in profitable or near-profitable European software businesses that have proven their product at scale. Will Sheldon, the Expedition partner leading the investment, called Nesto "an exceptional example of a category-defining European software company" that had been "quietly transforming restaurant operations across Europe."
The labour cost problem in hospitality
Restaurant groups face a specific workforce management challenge that differs from most industries. Operators must produce schedules that match variable demand-shifting with weather, local events, and day-of-week patterns-across dozens or hundreds of locations. Over-staffing erodes margins directly. Under-staffing affects service quality and customer retention.
Labour costs in EU hospitality rose 11.2% year-on-year before this fundraise. During the same period, only about 6% of EU hospitality businesses had adopted AI tools. Nesto addresses this gap between cost pressure and adoption.
Nesto's platform integrates with point-of-sale systems, supplier platforms, and payroll providers. It produces demand forecasts the company says achieve 92% accuracy, drawing on historical sales data, local event calendars, and weather inputs. McDonald's European franchise operators recorded a 9% reduction in staff costs and a 22% productivity improvement after deploying the platform. L'Osteria and Lagardère are among other named customers.
Moving into autonomous operations
Nesto's latest product direction is NORA, an AI assistant and agent framework that extends beyond scheduling into broader operational and administrative tasks. NORA handles queries about staffing rules, compliance requirements, and operational metrics, and executes tasks such as absence management, shift-swap approvals, and payroll exception handling without requiring manual navigation across multiple systems.
The funding will be used in part to develop NORA from an assistant that answers questions into an agent framework that executes multi-step workflows autonomously. For a restaurant group managing hundreds of sites, the primary value is reducing managerial overhead: each new location adds scheduling complexity, compliance surface area, and payroll administration without adding management capacity.
Broader sector momentum
Nesto is one of several European hospitality technology companies that raised institutional capital in early 2026. In late March, SOUS raised €4 million for an AI growth platform targeting customer acquisition. In mid-March, Choice raised $7.1 million to help restaurants build direct ordering channels and reduce dependence on third-party delivery platforms.
Together, these rounds show how the restaurant technology stack is being rebuilt from multiple directions. Nesto addresses the operations and labour layer-how staff are scheduled, costed, and managed efficiently. The concentration reflects both the sector's AI adoption gap and investor appetite for the category.
For managers in restaurant operations, understanding how AI applies to workforce scheduling and operational efficiency is becoming essential as these tools move from optional to standard practice.
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