In short: Nesto Software GmbH, a Karlsruhe-based workforce management platform for restaurant groups, has raised €11 million in growth equity from Expedition Growth Capital, a London and Boston-based fund that targets bootstrapped European software businesses with more than €5 million in annual recurring revenue. The company, founded by engineers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, manages scheduling, demand forecasting, HR workflows, and payroll preparation for more than 3,000 restaurant locations and more than 100,000 daily employee shifts across Europe. Nesto had never taken institutional funding before this round. The investment will be used to accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing, and extend NORA, Nesto’s AI assistant, into a broader agent framework for restaurant back-office workflows.

Built without institutional capital

Nesto was founded in Karlsruhe by Felix Kaiser, who serves as Co-Founder and CEO, and Dr. Theodor Ackbarow, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, both of whom trained as engineers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The company built its platform and grew its customer base to more than 3,000 restaurant locations without taking external funding, reaching the scale that Expedition Growth Capital specifically targets before approaching institutional investors. Expedition’s investment thesis centres on bootstrapped European software companies that have reached €5 million or more in annual recurring revenue, on the grounds that businesses built without outside capital tend to have closer customer relationships and more disciplined unit economics than those that have scaled on early dilutive rounds.

Expedition Growth Capital closed its third fund at $375 million in December 2025 and invests between $10 million and $25 million in each portfolio company. The Nesto round sits at the lower end of that range. Will Sheldon, the Expedition partner leading the investment, described Nesto as “an exceptional example of a category-defining European software company” that had been “quietly transforming restaurant operations across Europe.” Expedition, which has offices in London and Boston, focuses on profitable or near-profitable software businesses that are ready to invest in sales and marketing capacity after proving the product against real customers at scale.

Labour as the specific problem

The hospitality sector has a version of the workforce management problem that is both more complex and more costly than most industries face. A restaurant group operating across dozens or hundreds of locations must produce schedules that match variable demand, often shifting with weather, local events, and day-of-week patterns in ways that fixed weekly rotas cannot capture. Over-staffing erodes margin directly; under-staffing affects service quality and, in turn, customer retention. The administrative burden of producing legally compliant schedules, tracking attendance, and preparing payroll across a large distributed workforce consumes management time that would otherwise go to service delivery.

Labour costs across the EU hospitality sector rose 11.2% year-on-year in the period leading up to the Nesto fundraise, while EU hospitality businesses adopted AI tools at a rate of approximately 6% as of 2023, according to Eurostat data. The gap between cost pressure and adoption rate is the commercial opportunity Nesto addresses. TNW examined how AI is transforming hospitality operations while preserving the human experience in April 2026, a tension that Nesto’s positioning addresses directly: the company’s argument is that automating scheduling and administration frees managers to focus on service quality rather than spreadsheets.

Nesto’s platform integrates with point-of-sale systems, supplier platforms, and payroll providers to produce demand forecasts that the company says achieve 92% accuracy, drawing on historical sales data, local event calendars, and weather inputs. Those forecasts drive automated scheduling, which feeds HR workflows and payroll preparation. The company cites a 10% improvement in labour productivity as a headline outcome across its customer base, and points to McDonald’s as its most publicly documented deployment: the fast food company’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 the other named enterprise customers.

NORA and the agentic layer

Nesto’s most recent product development direction is NORA, an AI assistant and agent framework that extends the platform’s remit from scheduling into the broader range of operational and administrative tasks that restaurant managers handle daily. NORA is designed to handle queries about staffing rules, compliance requirements, and operational metrics, and to execute tasks such as absence management, shift-swap approvals, and payroll exception handling without requiring manual navigation across multiple systems.

The direction reflects a broader movement in enterprise software toward AI agents that operate on behalf of users rather than simply surfacing information. Nvidia brought enterprise security to AI agent deployments with its NemoClaw platform at GTC 2026 in March, establishing formal standards for deploying AI agents in regulated and operationally sensitive environments. Nesto’s NORA architecture targets the same conceptual space, applied to restaurant operations: an agent that can be assigned a task and trusted to complete it within defined operational and compliance parameters, without requiring a manager to supervise each step.

The funding will be used in part to develop NORA from an assistant that answers operational questions into an agent framework that executes multi-step workflows autonomously. For a restaurant group managing hundreds of sites, the primary value of that shift is in reducing the managerial overhead that currently scales with the number of locations: each new site adds scheduling complexity, compliance surface area, and payroll administration without adding the management capacity to absorb it.

Three funding rounds, three layers of the restaurant stack

Nesto is one of several European hospitality technology companies that raised institutional capital in early 2026, a concentration that reflects the sector’s AI adoption gap as much as investor appetite for the category. In late March 2026, SOUS raised €4 million to build an AI growth platform for restaurants, targeting the demand-generation layer: how restaurant groups attract customers, drive repeat visits, and grow revenue per cover. In mid-March 2026, Choice raised $7.1 million to help restaurants build direct ordering channels, addressing the distribution layer: how operators reduce dependence on third-party delivery platforms and capture more of the customer relationship directly.

Nesto addresses the operations and labour layer: not how customers arrive or what they order, but whether the staff to serve them are scheduled, costed, and managed efficiently. The three rounds together indicate how the restaurant technology stack is being rebuilt from multiple directions simultaneously, with growth capital moving into the sector at a level that was not visible two years earlier. The broader European software environment that produced the conditions for all three rounds was characterised by continued institutional interest in the first quarter of 2026: five European startups joined the unicorn club in the opening weeks of 2026, a signal that the European technology ecosystem retained sufficient momentum to produce high-valuation outcomes even as the macroeconomic environment remained uncertain.