Ordero, a startup building a meal-ordering platform serving everything from schools and kindergartens to businesses, has raised a €150,000 investment from venture capital funds FIRSTPICK and Lost Astronaut. The investment will go toward active product development, with the goal of working with more than 100 partners in Poland over the next 12 months.

Founded in Vilnius, the startup is developing a platform designed to simplify the catering-order process. Starting with meals for children, the team brought together three separately operating parties, parents, educational institutions, and catering providers into a single system.

Through the Ordero app, parents can order, adjust, or cancel their children’s meals and provide allergy information; companies get a more accurate demand forecast and can operate more efficiently without wasting food; and preschools and schools no longer have to reconcile orders at the last minute or absorb losses from inaccurate orders. Today the platform is used by more than 100 partners in Lithuania, including Vaikystės sodas, Demokratinė mokykla (Democratic School), Vitlio licėjus, Šiaurės licėjus, Montessori akademija, KD International, and various businesses.

“Each of us on the team had the chance to observe up close how startups emerge and develop across different fields. Seeing a clear problem in administering food orders, we realized we had an opportunity to improve this process using technology. That’s what drove us to build Ordero,” says Nedas Šapalas, one of the startup’s co-founders.

According to FIRSTPICK and Lost Astronaut, the decision to invest was driven not only by the business results achieved, but also by the team: the founders’ approach to customers, the product, and their working principles.

“The most promising early-stage startups usually emerge where founders solve a problem familiar to them from daily life, not an abstract one but one they’ve seen up close. Ordero is exactly that case: the team took the real, widely familiar chaos of meal ordering and turned it into a working solution. A product like this has the potential to become the standard for the entire sector,” says Marius Burgaila, co-founder and CEO of Lost Astronaut.

“The best investments often start from personal experience. Having used Ordero myself as a customer, managing orders and payments through the app, we saw how smoothly the product solves a daily headache for parents and institutions. At the same time, we see potential to bring this model to other markets,” says Marijus Andrijauskas, partner at FIRSTPICK.

FIRSTPICK and Lost Astronaut have set a goal of investing in as many as 100 early-stage startups over the next three years, with the average investment expected to be around €100,000. To that end, they are building an “All-stars” league made up of the best entrepreneurs in the Baltic states; selected startups will join a team of more than 250 “stars” and receive support to help them avoid mistakes, maintain their growth pace, and focus on what has the greatest impact on results.