How an Infobip Startup Tribe member Crumbs built Croatia’s fastest-growing food rescue platform

Croatian food rescue app Crumbs has closed a €600,000 seed round from AYMO Ventures, crossing 90,000 users and 500 partner locations. CEO Antonio Matušan tells us the full story of going from door-to-door bakery visits to one of Southeast Europe’s fastest-growing sustainability platforms, and what Infobip Startup Tribe looked like from the inside.

Croatia’s food rescue startup Crumbs has closed a €600,000 seed round from AYMO Ventures, marking the first institutional investment in the company. With 90,000 registered users, 500 active partner locations across ten Croatian cities, and more than 80,000 food packages saved from the waste bin, the platform is now preparing to launch in Serbia and Slovenia within months, with larger underserved markets to follow.

By the end of 2026, the target is 1,000 locations on the map. Several major retail chain names are already onboarding. For founder and CEO Antonio Matušan, the announcement is not a destination but a starting point.

Croatia discards over 280,000 tons of food every year. An estimated 40% of what ends up in the bin is still perfectly safe to eat. Matušan had seen the waste up close running a previous food startup, and the gap between what is produced and what is consumed stayed with him.

“I began to see how much food we were wasting. We couldn’t eat it all, sometimes we couldn’t even give it away. We were creating waste, and a bad feeling in my gut along with it.”
Antonio Matušan, CEO & Founder, Crumbs

Crumbs was founded in 2024 to fix that. The product is simple: open the app, reserve a surplus food package from a nearby bakery, restaurant, or supermarket at a minimum 50% discount, pay in-app, and pick it up in person when the notification fires. Over 50% of users are active every month, averaging one to two purchases per week. These are regulars, not one-time bargain hunters.

“They don’t need to trust us with their food. They need to trust that their food is good enough for people to buy and love. We bring the audience. It is their job to make sure people come back for more.”
Antonio Matušan, CEO & Founder, Crumbs

Crumbs did not find Infobip through a cold email or a banner ad. The connection started with a competition. Infobip, Kaufland, and Maistra organized a food tech startup challenge. Matušan entered with Crumbs. He won.

That win opened the door to Infobip Startup Tribe, where Crumbs found three things that early-stage companies rarely get at the same time: technology infrastructure, a competitive stage, and a network of people worth knowing.

Through the Tribe, the team joined the Scale 2.0 program, Infobip’s acceleration track for growth-stage startups. Then came the Shift conference in Zadar, one of the largest technology events in Southeast Europe. Crumbs competed in the pitching competition. They won again, taking home €10,000, the second Infobip ecosystem win for the company.

The Shift win mattered for a reason that goes beyond the prize.

“After the Shift pitching competition, we raised from one of the VCs who was in the judges’ panel,” Matušan says. “People are what matters most.”

The VC who watched Crumbs pitch on the Shift stage is now an investor in the company.

“Since I have the phone numbers of everyone in the Startup Tribe, Infobip feels like home. A place you can always come back to and ask for help. That is rare.”
Antonio Matušan, CEO & Founder, Crumbs

The Tribe also introduced Matušan to mentors and industry experts he describes as people he could be real with, and to other founders building under the same conditions: fast, uncertain, and in motion.

“I met other founders who are building the plane while flying it, just like me.”
For founders considering applying, his message takes three seconds: “What are you waiting for?”

Crumbs runs on Infobip communication infrastructure. Two channels are live today. A third is coming.

E-mail handles the transactional layer: confirmations, account communications, and the messages users receive throughout their journey on the platform. Reliable delivery at scale is not a nice-to-have when 90,000 users are depending on it.

Push notifications are where the product experience becomes tangible. When a pickup window opens, users get a push. When a Wishlist item goes live, a push fires immediately. This is the mechanic behind one of the most telling behavioral signals in the entire product: some of the most popular locations sell out within seconds of going live because users are waiting, watching, ready to act the moment the notification arrives.

“The Wishlist with notifications, without a doubt,” Matušan says when asked about his favorite feature. “Some of my personal favourite spots sell out in literal seconds when they go live. People are queuing up digitally, waiting. On a larger scale, that tells you everything: people love the product, they want it, and they are motivated to act fast to save it. That is the behavior change we are after.”

The speed and reliability of that notification loop matters. A push notification that arrives ten seconds late on a product selling out in five seconds is a missed conversion and a broken promise to the user. Infobip’s infrastructure is what makes the Wishlist feature work the way users have come to expect.

OTP SMS is next in the pipeline, with Crumbs set to implement Infobip’s one-time password solution for user verification. As the platform expands into new markets and onboards hundreds of new locations, verified users are a foundation for trust on both sides of the transaction.

The Tribe’s platform credits accelerated the path to getting here. “When you’re early-stage and start stacking up platforms, the costs add up fast. The Infobip credits were a real kick in the right direction. They helped us accelerate growth and took one financial worry off the table.”

The seed round from AYMO Ventures is the first institutional capital into Crumbs. AYMO manages €57 million in assets and has backed several of Croatia’s highest-profile technology companies. Co-founder Robert Bukvić, who previously built the rent24 coworking platform, served as the first outside investor prior to this round.

Serbia and Slovenia are weeks from launch. After the region, Matušan is preparing to enter larger underserved markets with a new business vertical and additional product capabilities he is not yet cleared to announce. A B2B layer is also taking shape: AI-powered tools for supermarkets and retail chains to predict surplus inventory before waste occurs, moving the product upstream from rescue to prevention.

A loyalty program lands in summer 2026, with projections showing a fivefold increase in active partner locations. The 1,000-location target is set for year-end.

“Scaling, both horizontally and vertically. I can’t show all my cards yet, marketing and PR won’t let me.”
Antonio Matušan, CEO & Founder, Crumbs

“We started as an anomaly in our market and became a habit,” Matušan says. “For a lot of people, saving food with Crumbs has become a regular part of their day. That is real behavior change.”

Crumb by crumb, the pile is growing.