B2B marketplaces don't trend on LinkedIn. Nobody is writing breathless articles about the future of hospitality wholesale procurement. The category doesn't produce the kind of consumer-facing product moments that generate design awards or end up in startup newsletters. That's precisely why we've been paying close attention to it since we launched Banksia. The sectors that generate sustained venture returns tend to be the ones where the problem is large, structurally underserved, and operating far below the attention threshold of the media cycle.
Consider the supply chain that sits behind a mid-size hospitality group in Australia — say, a ten-venue operator across Sydney and Melbourne. That group is managing procurement relationships with somewhere between 60 and 120 suppliers: beverage distributors, fresh produce suppliers, protein suppliers, packaging vendors, cleaning and hygiene suppliers. The bulk of those relationships are managed through a combination of phone orders, email, WhatsApp messages, paper invoices, and manual reconciliation in accounting software that wasn't designed for multi-venue procurement. The supplier side mirrors this: a regional beverage distributor selling to 200 venues is managing that same fragmentation in reverse, with a sales team that spends a significant portion of its time on low-value order confirmation tasks rather than relationship management and upsell. The inefficiency on both sides of this transaction is enormous and completely invisible to anyone not operating inside it.
Ordermentum, which we backed at pre-seed in 2022, is building the B2B marketplace infrastructure for this sector. The core insight is that the hospitality food service supply chain has specific transaction dynamics that generic B2B procurement platforms don't address well — the ordering cadence (daily or near-daily for fresh goods), the credit terms structure, the delivery window expectations, and the catalogue management requirements for suppliers managing seasonal and availability-driven SKU lists. Building for that specific context, rather than building a horizontal B2B ordering platform and hoping it works for food service, is the right approach. The buyers and suppliers who operate in this vertical have distinct enough requirements that a purpose-built solution creates substantially better unit economics on both sides of the marketplace.
The B2B marketplace model has structural advantages over B2C that the GMV headlines tend to obscure. B2B buyers have high repeat purchase rates, predictable order cadences, and low churn once the ordering workflow is embedded in their operations. The take rate structures are different — often lower percentage but higher absolute margin because order values are larger — and the competitive dynamics are less susceptible to consumer acquisition cost inflation. We're not saying B2C commerce isn't interesting or investable. What we're saying is that the unit economics case for B2B marketplace infrastructure is often more durable over a long time horizon, and the market size in categories like hospitality supply chain, construction materials, and professional services procurement is large enough to build significant standalone businesses.
The automation dimension is where the next several years get interesting. The order placement and supplier matching problems that first-generation B2B marketplaces solved are now table stakes. The frontier is demand forecasting integrated with ordering, inventory management that spans both buyer and supplier, and compliance and documentation workflows that reduce the administrative load of procurement in regulated categories. The B2B marketplaces that figure out how to make those downstream processes as frictionless as the ordering experience itself will capture a substantially larger share of the value in their supply chains.