Why we're building Kotao

Picture this: you run a restaurant. Lunch service, 45 seats, six employees. Your day looks something like this. You open the POS system in the morning to check yesterday's revenue. Then you switch to the scheduling app to see who's working today. Then to inventory management because you need to reorder tomatoes. Then to your accounting software to approve an invoice. Then to the reservation platform because a party of twelve is coming tonight.

Five apps. Five logins. Five monthly bills. And none of them know what the others are doing.

Your POS system has no idea what's in your stockroom. Your reservation tool knows nothing about your table layout. Your accounting software only gets revenue data when you export it by hand. Every evening you spend 45 minutes pulling numbers from different systems that should have been connected from the start.

This isn't some edge case. This is daily life in hospitality, retail, and hotels. And that's exactly why we're building Kotao.

The problem

The software landscape for restaurant owners, hoteliers, and retailers is broken. Not a little broken — fundamentally broken.

Most businesses run on a patchwork of tools that were never designed to work together. A POS system from vendor A, payment processing from vendor B, inventory management from vendor C, accounting from vendor D. Every tool has its own database, its own interface, its own pricing structure.

The consequences are real:

You're paying 300 euros a month or more. For features you never use, because the "premium" plan is the only one that includes the single function you actually need. Add setup fees, hardware leases, maintenance contracts. By the end of the year, you've spent five figures on software and used maybe 30 percent of it.

You're locked into proprietary hardware. Your terminal only works with one provider. Your POS system only runs on a specific tablet. Want to switch? Start from scratch: new hardware, new setup, new training for your team. The vendors know this, and that's why nothing changes.

Your data belongs to you. In theory. In practice, you get a CSV export at best. No API access, no real-time sync, no actual ownership of the information your business runs on. You can't even pull your own sales data into a spreadsheet automatically without plugging in a third-party service.

And then the updates. Your POS provider just got acquired by a private equity firm. Prices go up. Your contacts leave. Support stops answering in your language. But you're stuck, because switching means three weeks of work and you're in the middle of peak season.

This isn't an exaggeration. These are conversations we've had. With restaurant owners, with hoteliers, with retailers. The same story every time, just with different names on the invoices.

Why most alternatives don't work

There are alternatives, of course. But none of them solve the actual problem.

SumUp is simple and cheap. For a food truck or a farmers' market stand, it's perfectly fine. But the moment you run a proper restaurant with a table plan, kitchen printers, staff scheduling, and inventory, you hit the limits fast. You need an accounting integration, you want to know which staff member generates how much revenue, you need offline functionality when the Wi-Fi goes down. SumUp is a payment terminal with software bolted on, not an operating system for your business.

Lightspeed is powerful but expensive and complex. Setup takes weeks, monthly costs quickly climb into the hundreds, and you still need third-party integrations for accounting, staff scheduling, and payment processing. On top of that, Lightspeed is a publicly traded Canadian company under pressure to hit quarterly numbers. You feel that in their pricing and in how quickly terms can change. At the end of the day, you're back to the same patchwork — just with a more expensive centerpiece.

And then the legacy systems. Providers that have been in the market since 2010 and whose software looks like it. Black screens with orange text, three-day training sessions, support only by fax. An exaggeration? Barely. Many of these systems still dominate the German market because businesses are too afraid to switch.

The root problem is always the same: nobody built it as one platform. Instead, every provider started with one product — usually the register or the terminal — and then bolted on or acquired other features over the years. The result is systems that are technically five different codebases stitched together, and they feel exactly like it.

We asked ourselves: what if you got it right from the start? One platform that thinks about POS, operations, and payments together. Not as an afterthought integration, but as the foundation.

Who we are

Kotao has two founders, and that's by design.

Fynn Bloemer is our CPO. He spent years working in hospitality: in brewhouses, in restaurants, behind the bar and in the kitchen. During a year-long trip around the world, he worked in hostels and hotels, from the front desk to housekeeping. He has personally experienced every problem that operators deal with on a daily basis. He didn't read about it in a study or hear about it in a workshop. He lived it. He knows what it feels like when the register crashes at 7:30 PM and 40 guests are waiting. He knows what happens when the beverage supplier shows up and the stock list is wrong. He knows why employees quit after two weeks when scheduling is a mess.

I'm Nico Miebach, CEO and software engineer. My background is in technology. I build the platform, the architecture, the infrastructure. What drives me is building tools that actually do what they promise. Not bloated enterprise software you spend three months configuring. Not a slick demo that falls apart in real life. Software that works on day one and still works on day one thousand. I built Kotao from the ground up as a modern web platform — not on a framework from the 2000s held together with patches, but on a stack designed to last the next ten years.

We're not consultants who read market research reports and decided to build a startup. Fynn was behind the bar. I was behind the screen. Together, we understand both sides: what operators need and how to build it properly.

What we do differently

Three decisions set Kotao apart from almost everything else on the market. And none of them is a marketing gimmick.

We're self-funded. No venture capital, no investor rounds, no board of directors watching quarterly numbers. That sounds like a small detail, but it changes everything. When you're VC-funded, you build for growth. You need more customers, higher revenue, an exit. Your incentives are aligned with your investors, not your users.

We build for our users. If a feature doesn't make sense, we don't build it, no matter how good it would look on a pitch deck slide. If a customer has a problem, we fix it. Not because it improves some retention metric, but because it's the right thing to do. Being self-funded means we can think long-term. We don't have to raise a Series A in 18 months. We can take our time and build the right product.

We take data privacy seriously. Not as a checkbox, not as a badge on the website. European hosting. GDPR by design. End-to-end encryption wherever possible. Your business data — revenue, customer lists, employee records — belongs to you. Not to us, not to a cloud provider in the US, not to a data broker reselling your transaction history.

In an industry where many providers use your transaction data to optimize their own financial products or sell it to third parties, this isn't a given. It's a deliberate choice that costs us money in the short term and builds trust over the long run.

We're building a platform, not a collection. POS, operations, and payments aren't three acquired products loosely connected through an API. They were designed as one system from day one. That means: when a guest pays, inventory updates in real time. When an employee swaps a shift, the staffing plan adjusts instantly. When you close out the register at the end of the night, the numbers are already in your accounting system. No export, no import, no copy-paste.

What we're building

Kotao consists of three products that together replace the five to ten separate tools you're using today.

Kotao Workspaces is the command center of your business. Everything comes together here: POS and point of sale, inventory management, table planning, staff scheduling, customer management, reporting. Not as a feature list that reads well on a landing page, but as a thought-out system where every component talks to every other one.

For you, that means: one login, one interface, one point of contact. At a glance, you see what's happening today — which tables are occupied, which staff member is where, which products need reordering, what went well yesterday and what didn't. You make better decisions because you have better data. And you save the 45 minutes every day that you used to spend switching between systems and reconciling numbers by hand.

If you want to go deeper, we wrote a detailed guide to POS systems in hospitality in 2026 that compares the different approaches.

Kotao Payments is our payment processing. One rate, transparent, no hidden fees. Card terminals and online payments from a single source. No surprises on your monthly statement, no fine print that turns expensive six months in.

Because Payments is directly integrated into Workspaces, the connection happens automatically. Every payment is instantly assigned to the right table, the right staff member, and the right accounting ledger. That's the difference compared to an external terminal where you manually reconcile card payments and register totals every night.

Kotao Cloud is coming next. European hosting, automatic backups, open APIs. The technical foundation everything runs on, making sure your data stays where it belongs: with you, on European servers, under European law. For businesses that want to build their own integrations or have a developer who needs to pull data into existing systems, this is the access point that other providers deliberately lock down.

What this means for you

We didn't build Kotao because the market needed another POS app. There are plenty of those. We built it because we saw how much time, money, and energy operators lose every single day — with tools that don't work together, with providers that put their own interests above their customers', and with an industry that has gotten used to "good enough" being the best you can expect.

We're early. We're small. We make mistakes and we learn from them. But we're building something that doesn't exist in Europe yet: a platform that truly unifies POS, operations, and payments, that belongs to you, that's honestly priced, and that's built by people who understand what your daily reality looks like. Not because we read it in a market study, but because one of us stood in your shoes every day while the other built the software to make it better.

If you want to see what we're building, check out Kotao Workspaces. Or just reach out.