The Osnabrück startup’s camera-based self-checkout, which identifies food and drinks without barcodes in under 10 seconds, is already running at 43 points of sale inside the Orlando Magic’s NBA arena and across about a third of German university campuses. The Series A was led by eCAPITAL and Simon Capital.
VisioLab, a German startup that makes AI-powered self-checkout systems for the foodservice industry, has closed an $11 million Series A led by eCAPITAL and Simon Capital. Existing backers High-Tech Gründerfonds, APX (the joint Axel Springer and Porsche fund), and family office zwei.7 also participated.
The company, founded in Osnabrück in 2019, will use the capital to accelerate international expansion, grow its team from 25 to around 40 people, and open a dedicated US office in Boston.
The product is deliberately low-hardware. A customer at a stadium concession stand or a university cafeteria places their food and drinks under a standard Apple iPad.
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A camera-based AI identifies the items within seconds, without barcodes, without specialist scanning equipment, without a long queue, displays the price, and accepts payment via a compact Bluetooth terminal.
The entire unit weighs less than 25 pounds and can be set up in 15 minutes. Training the AI on a new menu of around 150 items takes approximately four minutes, according to the company. The model runs as an app on the iPad itself, meaning there is no proprietary hardware to replace when Apple refreshes its device line.
The US market has been the primary growth driver. VisioLab currently operates 43 systems inside the Kia Center, home arena of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, covering nearly the entire venue. NFL teams the Atlanta Falcons and the Carolina Panthers use the system at their stadiums, and Inter Miami has selected VisioLab as a launch partner for its new NU stadium.
The US now accounts for approximately 50% of VisioLab’s revenue, with the company claiming annual growth in the region exceeding 1,000%, a figure that reflects a small absolute base but underscores rapid adoption in the sports and entertainment vertical.
The company says it processes around one million transactions per month across all deployments.
The other half of the business is more prosaic but arguably more defensible: corporate canteens, university cafeterias, and staff restaurants at large German employers. Around one in three German university campuses uses VisioLab’s technology through student services organisations.
The system is deployed in staff dining at DAX-listed corporations and companies in banking, insurance, and automotive. Global catering companies Compass Group and Aramark are both partners in Europe and the US, a distribution advantage that effectively embeds VisioLab into venues these two companies already operate, without VisioLab needing to win each site independently.
The funding will support market entries in Australia, New Zealand, Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Iwo Gernemann, co-founder and president, will lead the US expansion from Boston.
New executives are being brought in from Klarna, SumUp, and Google, and around 15 roles are currently open across go-to-market in Boston and engineering in Germany.
The foodservice checkout market is a genuine problem space: high-volume, time-sensitive, and poorly served by traditional barcode scanning, which breaks down when staff are dealing with hundreds of different menu items, substitutions, and made-to-order combinations.
VisioLab’s vision-based approach sidesteps the barcode problem entirely, but it introduces its own challenges: the AI must reliably distinguish between similar-looking items at speed, handle partially obscured products, and remain accurate across lighting conditions in environments ranging from brightly lit corporate cafeterias to the lower-light concourse of an indoor arena.
