Apr 21, 2020
VisioLab: Making your canteen check-out experience more convenient
Meet Justin and Tim. With their startup VisioLab, they aspire to fully automate the check-out processes in canteens and cafeterias.
It’s lunchtime, and you and your colleagues are heading to the canteen. You are hungry. The last thing you need right now is a lot of waiting to get food. But then you see the line at the checkout… Sounds familiar?
With VisioLab, Justin Shenk and Tim Niekamp are on a mission to lastingly change lunch experiences for both customers and canteens.
Together with their team, they provide flawless check-out experiences in canteens by offering an AI-based, automated software solution in combination with a hardware-enabled object recognition service, which identifies the composition of orders (dishes, menus, etc.) instantly.
The goal is to help customers pay and proceed faster to the most important part of their lunchtime — eating. But it is also to help canteens serve people faster to increase their own revenues, improve general customer satisfaction, and to be more sustainable.
“We provide the canteens with useful data so they can better calculate their supply and therefore will also be able to reduce food-waste”, says Justin.
Soon in university canteens
Both co-founders simultaneously worked on similar projects before meeting each other. Tim decided to go full-time for Visiolab in the summer of 2019.
Before that, he was working for Sandpiper, the mother company of InterCard, who is the predominant payment service provider for university canteens in the DACH region and now their first strategic partner. They are looking to implement VisioLab’s check-out solution in universities.
Around the same time, Justin worked as a freelance consultant on a food recognition app with a Canadian hospital. Eventually, their paths crossed when Justin joined Osnabrück-based accelerator Seedhouse and met Tim by recommendation of other Seedhouse startup founders.
VisioLab joined APX’s 100-days-Tailormade program in March looking to accelerate their product further, as well as profiting from the wide-ranging network and the Berlin ecosystem.
