Bottle-Up, a Tuscan foodtech start-up specialising in the on-demand customisation of food and wine products and private labels, has announced that it has closed a €1.5 million round with an international family office. After a phase of self-financed growth that led the company to break even in 2024, the transaction represents its first institutional capital increase.
The resources will be used primarily in four key areas: upgrading proprietary software for supply chain digitisation, expanding the team with new key personnel, investing in state-of-the-art customisation machinery, and international expansion.
Founded in 2015 by Francesco Farnetani, a former Deloitte consultant, Bottle-Up has transformed an intuition – replicating in wine the customisation model experimented with a Nike configurator – into a solid project in the Italian food-winetech landscape.
From the first Tuscan wines with customised labels to the current portfolio of over 250 private label products, including wines, beers, spirits, oil, non-alcoholic beverages, fruit extracts, savoury snacks, dried and dehydrated fruit, as well as pasta, condiment sauces and traditional Christmas and Easter desserts, Bottle-Up has built a scalable model that integrates Italian craftsmanship, e-commerce and digital logistics, making customisation, which until yesterday was reserved for large players, accessible to SMEs and private customers without minimum order requirements. Thanks to its proprietary technology platform, which combines a web configurator, API system, dynamic pricing algorithms and an integrated logistics infrastructure, Bottle-Up manages the entire process: from product selection to bottling and packaging, from label design to delivery.
Bottle-Up closes 2024 with a substantial balance between costs and revenues, with a broad portfolio of private label products, a 950 m² facility equipped with proprietary machinery, and third-party logistics services for food producers and companies. Today, the company caters to a wide and diverse audience: from B2C to corporate companies, from hotels and restaurants to export and retail, to third-party logistics services.
The round marks the start of a new phase of international growth: from resilience to scalability, with the aim of consolidating Bottle-Up’s position as a key player in Europe and non-EU markets.
“With this round, we are opening a new chapter, moving from resilience to the actual development phase, while maintaining a sustainable approach focused on business solidity. Our mission is to make the customisation of food and wine products accessible to everyone, digitising the entire supply chain and promoting Italian-made products around the world,” said Francesco Farnetani, founder and CEO of Bottle-Up, in a statement.
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