- Rome-based Bestie Bite has raised €1.5 million in a SAFE round led by Italian holding company G&G, bringing its total funding to €2.2 million in under four months.
- The startup lets consumers discover restaurants through short, AI-verified customer videos, while giving venues an automated marketing tool that turns a single clip into a month of social content.
- The global restaurant technology market is projected to grow from $25.6 billion in 2024 to $41.42 billion by 2033, as Gen Z and millennials shift away from written reviews toward video-first discovery.
Most restaurant reviews are either fake, sponsored, or written by someone whose taste you don’t trust. Bestie Bite thinks short video, verified by artificial intelligence, is the fix.
The Rome-based startup has raised €1.5 million in a Simple Agreement for Future Equity round led by the Grassi family through G&G, the holding company behind logistics automation group E80 Group. The round closes less than four months after a €700,000 seed led by Techstars, bringing Bestie Bite’s total funding to €2.2 million.
Turning restaurant discovery into a vibe check
Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo and Caterina Vertefeuille founded Bestie Bite in Rome in 2024.
The pair had previously built a sustainability startup together and spent years working across hospitality and marketing, close enough to see the same problem from both sides: consumers couldn’t trust what they read, and small restaurants couldn’t afford to compete online with larger brands.
Bestie Bite works by replacing written reviews with short videos uploaded by real customers. Its app uses AI to learn user preferences and surface personalised venue recommendations. Every submission goes through authentication checks, fraud detection, and AI-generated content screening before it goes live.
For example, a user searching for a casual lunch spot in a new neighbourhood gets video recommendations filtered to their taste. not a star rating from an anonymous account.
On the venue side, Bestie Bite gives restaurants an automated marketing tool it calls an AI Marketing Employee. It takes a single customer video and generates a month’s worth of social media content, published automatically across a venue’s channels. It also feeds owners real-time sentiment analysis and customer feedback data. Italian restaurant group Pescaria is among its early enterprise customers.
The startup has surpassed 100,000 users and 120,000 video reviews across 80 countries.
The competitive landscape
TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps still dominate traditional review discovery. TikTok and Instagram have become default restaurant-browsing tools for younger consumers, but neither platform offers verified reviews or marketing infrastructure for venues.
In restaurant technology more broadly, Owner.com raised $120 million in a Series C in June 2025 at a valuation above $1 billion, scaling AI marketing and ordering tools for more than 10,000 independent restaurants. Owner.com targets a similar restaurant-side workflow, though it focuses on ordering infrastructure and customer relationship management rather than video discovery.
Bestie Bite’s bet is that combining verified consumer discovery with venue marketing in a single platform is a gap neither category has filled.
“We want to change this market. Authenticity is the most valuable and scarce asset on the web. With this round, we are accelerating from Italy to the United States to make this the global standard,” co-founder Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo says.
From Rome to San Francisco
The latest funding round will primarily support Bestie Bite’s international growth ambitions. The company has chosen San Francisco as its first US base, attracted by both the city’s technology ecosystem and its highly competitive hospitality market.
The global restaurant technology market was valued at $25.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $41.42 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 6.2%. AI and machine learning currently influence around 20% of dining venues, with a focus largely on predictive analytics and personalisation.
If Bestie Bite is right, that video-first discovery becomes the default for the next generation of restaurant customers, the window to own that category is open — but not indefinitely.
“We want to change this market. Authenticity is the most valuable and scarce asset on the web. With this round, we are accelerating from Italy to the United States to make this the global standard,” conclude co-founders Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo and Caterina Vertefeuille.
