The Dubai platform stitching a fragmented food-and-beverage supply chain back together - marketplace, point of sale, analytics and financing, on one screen.
"WE ARE WATERMELON" - the company's own brand mark. A foodtech built by people who ran restaurants, for the people who still do.
Watermelon Ecosystem is a business-to-business platform for the food-and-beverage trade. It connects restaurants, hotels, cafes, caterers and cloud kitchens - the world the industry calls HORECA - directly with the suppliers who feed them, then wraps ordering, payments, inventory and credit into one place.
Run a restaurant and the back office looks like this: fifteen or twenty suppliers, each with a different order channel, a different delivery day and a different payment date. Purchase orders live in WhatsApp threads. Invoices arrive on paper. Stock is a guess. Cash flow is a scramble. Watermelon collapses that mess into a marketplace where a buyer can compare prices, negotiate, place an order, receive an invoice and track what they owe - without leaving the app.
The premise is unglamorous and deliberate. Watermelon is not another delivery brand chasing the plate; it is the plumbing behind it. By digitizing the boring middle of the supply chain - procurement, reconciliation, forecasting - it hands restaurant owners back the hours they used to lose to phone calls and paperwork, and gives them data they never had before.
The company started with two restaurants. The reported ~70% reduction in purchase time was measured across more than 7,000 orders - the kind of number that comes from usage, not a pitch deck.
"I had 15 to 20 suppliers that I had to pay at different times during the month, and that creates big issues."Omar AlShamsi · Founder & CEO
Omar AlShamsi is an Emirati entrepreneur with a background in trading and banking. Before Watermelon he ran Mamatani, an Emirati-cuisine restaurant that struggled - in part because of the exact supplier and cash-flow chaos the company now exists to solve. He built Watermelon in 2020 with co-founders bringing procurement and technology expertise, so the product was shaped by people who had lived the problem from the kitchen side and the balance-sheet side at once.
That lived experience is the company's core expertise: it understands that a restaurant which can't pay a supplier on time doesn't just need better software - it needs working capital. So the platform pairs operational tools with financing, using a restaurant's own order history as the data to underwrite credit. Supply chain and balance sheet, treated as one problem.
The B2B marketplace connecting F&B outlets with local and global suppliers - price comparison, negotiation, purchase orders and invoice management in one flow.
A cloud-based register that ties orders, payments and inventory together so the front of house and the back office finally talk to each other.
Embedded lending and invoice financing for F&B SMEs, underwritten on platform transaction data - working capital when a kitchen actually needs it.
Inventory, reporting, forecasting and financial analysis - the data layer that turns thousands of orders into decisions.
Access to 1,000+ local products from regional suppliers - shorter supply lines, less waste, lower cost.
Digital marketing and branding support to help F&B businesses on the platform reach more customers.
Fragmentation is the enemy. Each disconnected step adds time, error and cost. Watermelon's pitch is to shrink the bars below - an illustrative view of the friction it targets.
Illustrative. Bars represent relative friction the platform aims to reduce, not audited figures.
How it makes money. Watermelon runs a mix of marketplace revenue from buyer-supplier transactions, software subscriptions for the POS and management tools, and financing facilitation where it partners with lenders. Each layer feeds the next: more orders sharpen the data, better data underwrites better credit, and financing keeps buyers transacting.
How it's different. Competitors such as Choco and Rekki digitize the order; local distributors run their own portals; POS vendors handle the register. Watermelon's bet is that F&B operators would rather have one system than five - so it stacks marketplace, POS, analytics and finance together and lets the data compound across all of them. That's the moat: not any single feature, but the loop between them.
"This deal pairs Biz2X's financing technology with Watermelon's digital ecosystem of restaurateurs and other F&B entrepreneurs."Omar AlShamsi · on the Biz2X embedded-lending partnership
The UAE's food scene is glossy on the surface and chaotic underneath. Watermelon sits at the infrastructure layer of that market - between the thousands of outlets that buy and the suppliers that sell - in a region where F&B is a major, fast-digitizing sector.
It currently operates in the UAE with stated ambitions across the GCC. The $4M Series A, advised by Daman Investments, was explicitly raised to accelerate that regional expansion and deepen the technology. If the thesis holds - that procurement, payments and financing belong in one place - Watermelon is positioning to be the default rails the industry runs on.
Omar AlShamsi launches the company in Dubai to fix fragmented F&B procurement, joined by co-founders in procurement and technology.
The marketplace and management/analytics tools begin onboarding early restaurants.
Featured by The National; ~170 restaurants onboarded and a reported 70% cut in purchase time, with cloud POS in the mix.
Round advised by Daman Investments to accelerate GCC expansion and product development.
Adds embedded lending and invoice financing for F&B SMEs, with 24-48 hour loan processing.
It runs an all-in-one B2B platform for the food and beverage industry, connecting restaurants, hotels, cafes and caterers with suppliers, and adding POS, analytics and financing tools.
Omar AlShamsi, an Emirati entrepreneur with a trading and banking background, founded it in 2020, alongside co-founders Cristobal Albornoz (procurement) and Archya Sengupta (technology).
Watermelon raised a $4 million Series A in July 2024 at a $29 million post-money valuation, with Daman Investments as fundraising advisor.
It is headquartered in Barsha Heights, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and currently operates in the UAE with plans to expand across the GCC.
Through marketplace transactions, software subscriptions (POS and management tools), and facilitating embedded financing such as working capital and invoice financing for F&B businesses.