Brendi Raises $6.6M: The Startup Betting an iFood Co-Founder Was Right to Bet Against iFood

Patrick Sigrist knows exactly how much money a restaurant hands over every time an order comes through a delivery marketplace instead of its own front door. He co-founded iFood in 2011 — what started as a project called Disk Cook, three friends distributing flyers at colleges to drum up restaurant partners, before it grew into the delivery giant that now dominates Brazilian food delivery. Fourteen years later, Sigrist is putting his own money into a startup built almost entirely to help restaurants need iFood less.

That startup is Brendi, and its answer to the marketplace problem is disarmingly simple: meet customers where they already message anyway. Brendi's AI platform — voiced through an assistant the company calls Brenda — lets restaurants receive and manage orders directly through WhatsApp. Text, voice notes, full menus, payment, most of the back-and-forth automated end to end. No marketplace commission. No customer data locked inside somebody else's app. Just a restaurant's own WhatsApp number, doing more of the work a human staffer used to handle manually.

The pitch resonated widely enough to pull in a $6.6 million round led by Propel Ventures, with Big Bets, Norte Ventures, and Citrino joining in, and — beyond Sigrist — Hyperplane founder Daniel Silva rounding out the angel bench. It's a strong signal for a company operating in a category that lives or dies on trust: when the person who helped build one of the biggest delivery marketplaces in Latin America writes a personal check for the startup built to reduce dependence on marketplaces like his, that's not contradiction, it's conviction. Sigrist has seen both sides of the restaurant-versus-platform economics up close, and he's betting on the side that keeps more margin with the restaurant.

Brendi's plan for the capital is concrete and near-term: accelerate product development, scale from its current base to somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 restaurants by the end of the year, and use part of the round to repurchase shares from early angel investors — a detail worth noticing on its own. Buying back stock rather than just deploying every dollar into growth suggests a team confident enough in its own trajectory to consolidate ownership now, instead of letting early dilution compound indefinitely.

It's also the second time in as many weeks that WarZ Intelligence has covered a Brazilian startup built entirely on the assumption that WhatsApp isn't just a messaging app — it's already the operating system a huge share of the country's small businesses run on, whether anyone built software for that reality or not. Brendi is betting the restaurant industry is next.

Deal covered in WarZ LatAm VC Monitor — Weekly 29.