IZZA - Smart Purchasing Platform
How a validated idea, with no investment capital, became a company with a real operation and GMV over 16 million.
- Segment
- B2B - Marketplace
- Vertical
- Food and B2B purchasing
- Launch
- 2021
IZZA was born out of a real, clearly identified pain: buying food and supplies for schools and food service businesses was decentralized, slow and dependent on spreadsheets. Razzo came in to turn that opportunity into a digital, scalable platform.
The Challenge
After years working directly with the education market, IZZA's founders identified a critical bottleneck: buying and managing food was extremely inefficient, scattered across many suppliers and regional markets. Determined to solve that pain, they took the leap into entrepreneurship. At first, the operation ran manually — over WhatsApp and Excel spreadsheets. It didn't take long for demand to grow beyond what could be managed by hand.
The founders weren't working from an abstract hypothesis. They knew exactly which problem they wanted to solve, they understood customer behavior, and they already had businesses buying from them on a recurring basis. The market had given them the green light.
Customers ready on one side, no product on the other. Demand kept piling up.
The real challenge, though, was no longer validating the commercial thesis — it was turning it into a digital, scalable product. Building a purchasing platform robust enough to sustain a real operation takes leading-edge technology, an architecture designed to grow, and software engineering able to make that vision real. And that is exactly the piece that tends to be missing at this stage: risk capital and the technical know-how to build a digital asset worth having.
We met through a mutual friend's introduction. In Razzo's earliest days, we saw in IZZA a genuine opportunity to build a great success story: we combined the founders' market validation with our technical execution to create software built to last.
What we did
We came in not merely as vendors, but as true product partners. Together we created the name and the visual identity that are still in place today, and designed the price and savings comparison model that remains one of IZZA's main competitive advantages.
And here is the point that usually goes unnoticed when this story is told too quickly: we did not come in to consult, nor to maintain something that already existed. We came in to build the platform from scratch, investing our own technology structure before the very first order was ever placed.
2020 – 2021: From zero to the first order in record time
We took the first steps in late 2019, about two months before the pandemic began. Even facing global uncertainty, with schools closing and the food market at a standstill, we did not slow down. We raced against the clock to build the company and the product from scratch. In January 2021, in record time, the first version of the platform went into real operation, with an architecture, a data model and a buying experience fully adapted to the reality of buyers and suppliers.
2022: The first year in real operation
With the first version (v1) live, users began transacting daily: customers buying, suppliers selling and orders happening. Every transaction brought a new lesson about supply flows and the sector's rules. V1 carried the entire operation, proving day after day that the business model worked in practice.
2023: The investment round
It was that consistent growth — driven by real numbers, active customers and recurring revenue — that earned market recognition and opened the door to outside investment. IZZA sat down with investors presenting a platform in production and an operation up and running, not just a deck of slides.
2024: The second generation, built to scale
With the investment secured, we went back to the engineering table, this time not to prove a concept but to scale a business that had already been validated. We rebuilt the platform from scratch, adding new features, an even more robust data structure and an architecture ready to support operations across multiple states. A few weeks after launch, that new generation absorbed the largest purchasing peak in the company's history, with no instability and sustained high performance.
The result
The result of the partnership between Razzo and IZZA was a proprietary technology asset that turned pent-up demand into a highly scalable operation. The robust architecture we built made it possible to connect restaurants and institutions to a network of approved suppliers, enabling both the commercial SaaS model and the startup's social impact model. From the platform's launch to the publication of this case, that technical foundation has delivered significant numbers in traction, efficiency and savings:
- More than 50,000 orders placedThe platform passed the 50,000-order mark, transacted with stability and high performance.
- More than R$ 16.6 million in volume processedGross merchandise volume (GMV) grew steadily year over year, adding up to more than R$ 16.66 million in purchases processed directly through the software.
- R$ 388,000 in direct savings for customersThrough the EconomIZZA feature (with tracking active since 2023), the algorithm we developed to automatically split orders item by item generated more than R$ 388,200 in direct savings for buyers, along with budget reductions of up to 35% for social institutions.
- Consistent operational scaleThe continuous evolution of the architecture absorbed the jump in order volume — from roughly 2,800 in the first year to more than 15,000 orders a year in the most recent phases — with no technical bottlenecks and no downtime.
IZZA is not just a story from the past: it is an active operation still processing purchases every day. It is worth seeing the product in production and the accelerator that drove this journey.
Where to see IZZA
Why this case matters
A well-executed product partnership does not just get an idea off the ground: it sustains the company's growth in the years that follow.
IZZA did not need to raise millions to get started. It needed a partner who understood the business, came in investing alongside them and delivered the right technology at the right time — with no wasted resources and no shortcuts on quality.
From the MVP that got the operation running to the second generation built for scale, the path went through two product generations, an investment round and real geographic expansion. At every stage the technical question was the same: what does this architecture need to withstand next year, not just this one.
Today IZZA is no longer a promise or an experiment. It is a healthy company.
Capabilities demonstrated
- Digital product from scratch
- Marketplace and B2B purchasing platforms
- Architecture for multi-region expansion
- Development in short cycles
- Platform evolution and rebuilds
- End-to-end product partnership