London hospitality fintech Alpa raises €2.9M
Alpa, a London-based fintech building a financial operating system for the hospitality industry, has raised a €2.9M pre-seed round. The funding indicates continued investor interest in vertical SaaS solutions that tailor financial tools to the specific needs of niche industries.
The €2.9M pre-seed round for Alpa was led by the VC firm daphni, with participation from True, 2100 Ventures, and notable angel investors including former Burger King France CEO Jérôme Tafani, who has also joined the company's board. The funding is earmarked for strengthening the core product and engineering teams, focusing on financial data infrastructure, supplier integrations, and advancing AI-driven automation. Alpa was co-founded by CEO Anton Soulier, an early employee at Deliveroo and founder of the creator-led restaurant chain Taster, and CTO Jean-François Moy, who previously led multi-country engineering teams at Vestiaire Collective. The platform aims to solve the problem of delayed financial visibility in the hospitality sector by integrating with Point of Sale (POS) systems, banking data, and suppliers to provide a real-time profit and loss view, a critical need for an industry where 79% of restaurants want real-time data but 27% cannot track basic KPIs. The move into a CTO role at a scaling company requires a shift from pure engineering to strategic leadership, focusing on building leadership capabilities and processes to avoid becoming a bottleneck. As teams grow beyond 20-30 engineers, successful CTOs introduce new leadership layers, such as technical leads and engineering managers, to maintain velocity and quality. This strategic function is crucial for aligning technology with business objectives, a key differentiator from a purely hands-on engineering background. A major trend for enterprise CTOs is the rise of agentic AI workflows, where autonomous AI agents manage complex task sequences with minimal human oversight. Unlike traditional automation, these systems use LLMs to reason, plan, and interact with tools, adapting to new information in real-time. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one-third of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, moving beyond simple "prompt and response" to take direct action and streamline operations. In the adtech space, 2026 marks a significant reset, driven by signal loss from cookie deprecation and stricter privacy regulations. The focus is shifting to first-party data strategies, contextual targeting, and AI-driven creative optimization to deliver personalized ads. This has led to a "Custom AdTech Renaissance," where companies are building their own infrastructure to gain transparency and control over their data, decisioning, and measurement. London's tech ecosystem remains a dominant force in Europe, with its AI startups raising a record $3.5 billion in VC funding in 2024. The city's fintech sector is also a major driver of job creation, with fintech scaleups adding over 2,100 new employees in the last year. This activity is supported by a strong venture capital landscape, with London-based startups raising £344.7M across 79 deals in April 2025 alone. Recent Formula 1 news includes McLaren settling a dispute with a driver and Jenson Button tipping Lewis Hamilton to be at his best in the 2026 season. Meanwhile, local London news includes a rise in measles infections across the city, prompting health officials to urge families to check their vaccination status. Additionally, the Metropolitan Police are set to pilot facial recognition identity checks.
