Bestie Bite Raises €1.5M to Expand Its AI-Powered Hospitality Video Review Platform to the US

The June 2026 Funding Round Details

The fresh €1.5 million was raised via a SAFE instrument, a financial tool commonly used by startups to raise capital without immediately setting a valuation . The round was led by the Grassi family through their family holding company, G&G. The Grassi family is a shareholder of E80 Group S.p.A., an Italian industrial automation company .

This new capital arrives less than four months after Bestie Bite’s first institutional round. In December 2025, the company raised approximately $700,000 (~€650,000), a round led by the global accelerator Techstars with participation from Zooga VC, Mamba Ventures, and a group of business angels including Christian Marcon, Angelo La Rocca, and Claudio Vaccaro .

When combined, the two rounds give Bestie Bite roughly €2.2 million in total funding to execute its expansion plans .

The Problem: Fake Reviews and Broken Marketing

Bestie Bite is attacking a two-sided trust problem in the hospitality industry.

For consumers, the core frustration is that traditional review platforms are littered with inauthentic content, ranging from paid promotional posts to outright fabricated reviews. A written rating or a curated photo often fails to convey the real energy of a place. Bestie Bite’s short-form video format is designed to be inherently harder to fake and gives users a visceral sense of a venue before they visit .

For small hospitality businesses, the marketing landscape is broken in a different way. Most independent restaurants and hotels lack the budget to hire professional agencies or the time to constantly produce social media content. The startup notes that up to 90% of hospitality businesses cannot afford a marketing team . Bestie Bite’s B2B tools aim to turn their own customers into a de facto content creation engine, providing free, authentic marketing assets derived from real diner videos .

AI Features That Drive the Consumer Experience

The app uses artificial intelligence on both the consumer and business fronts to create a more trustworthy and engaging ecosystem.

• Personalized Video Discovery: The AI learns a user’s preferences over time and surfaces relevant short-form video content from venues they are likely to enjoy .
• Fraud Prevention and Video Verification: Unlike a text review, a video is more difficult to generate synthetically in a convincing way. The platform applies AI-based video detection and user authentication layers to flag and filter out fake content or deepfakes before they appear in the feed .
• Cashback Rewards and Missions: Users earn points for every action, including watching, reviewing, and sharing videos. Those points are convertible into real cashback. The platform also features gamified “Treats” and “Missions,” prompting users to visit specific venues to record a video in exchange for bonus rewards .

The Business Side: The AI Marketing Employee

For restaurant and hotel partners, Bestie Bite sells a software layer that the team calls an “AI Marketing Employee.”

This tool automates two critical business functions:

1. Editorial Planning and Content Generation: The AI sifts through customer-submitted videos and identifies the best clips that can be repurposed into ready-to-publish Instagram posts, TikTok clips, and other social media content. The goal is to let a venue owner approve a piece of content in a single click rather than planning, shooting, and editing a promotion from scratch .
2. Sentiment Analysis and Customer Insights: By processing the visual and audio data in customer video reviews, the platform detects recurring themes, identifies trending feedback, and tracks shifts in customer sentiment. This gives restaurant managers real-time data on service quality, menu reception, and atmosphere .

This structure creates a closed loop. Consumers supply the raw, authentic content. The AI transforms it into actionable business intelligence and free marketing material. The business’s improved online presence then attracts more diners, who in turn generate more content.

Founding Team Behind Bestie Bite

The startup is led by two second-time founders with deep roots in hospitality and entrepreneurship:

• Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo serves as CEO and Co-founder. She previously founded another company and has built Bestie Bite around the vision of bringing the full power of AI to small hospitality venues .
• Caterina Vertefeuille is the COO and Co-founder, sharing a background in startups and the food-and-beverage sector with her co-founder .

The technical direction of the platform’s artificial intelligence and fraud detection systems is overseen by Placido Falqueto, the CTO, who holds a PhD in AI and Robotics and works as a software engineer on the product's backend .

Growth Trajectory and Metrics

Bestie Bite’s user base has grown rapidly. According to the most recent data tied to the June 2026 funding announcement, the platform has crossed significant milestones :

• Registered Users: Over 100,000
• Uploaded Video Reviews: Over 120,000
• Global Reach: Present in 80 countries worldwide.

Earlier benchmarks from late 2025 showed the platform at about 70,000 users and 60,000 videos, indicating that the community roughly doubled its video output and grew its user base by more than 40% in less than six months . The app has also previously peaked in the top 10 most-downloaded apps in Italy's App Store charts .

Scaling From Italy to San Francisco

With the new capital, the company is not just looking to dominate its home market of Italy. The official plan outlined in the funding announcement is to use the €1.5 million for two distinct goals: continued consolidation and growth in Italy’s dense hospitality market, and a formal entry into the United States .

To lead the American expansion, Bestie Bite is establishing a physical base in San Francisco, California, dropping itself into one of the world’s most competitive and largest hospitality and technology ecosystems . The co-founders framed the move as an acceleration toward becoming a global standard for authentic video reviews.

In a statement accompanying the funding news, they said: “We are building a new standard that brings the full power of artificial intelligence to restaurants, always starting from real content. With this round, we are accelerating from Italy to the United States to make this the global standard.”