From connecting orders to building a technology ecosystem

In late 2014 and throughout 2015, Miguel Lobato, the project's founder, sees food delivery marketplaces and sales channels multiplying. For restaurants, each channel brings different orders, menus, devices and processes. Growing digital sales are also becoming an operational challenge.

At the same time, acquiring and activating restaurants requires marketplaces to invest heavily in sales teams, equipment and onboarding. The original idea combines two goals: centralising orders and menus and connecting them to the POS; and creating a network of restaurants ready to sell through new channels, making onboarding and connection simpler.

The project begins under the name Apetitus. Its ambition goes beyond connecting applications: it also envisages facilitating the commercial relationship between restaurants and marketplaces. Restaurants could access more sales channels, while marketplaces would find a network of kitchens ready to work with them.

Before developing that commercial model, one barrier needs to be overcome: getting systems to exchange orders, menus and statuses reliably.

Many POS systems were not equipped to receive third-party orders or share catalogue information. With help from partners and associates, we worked alongside their teams to define workflows, adapt data models and make those integrations possible.

The work also reaches the other side of the connection. We collaborate with technical teams at major food delivery platforms to improve APIs and integration processes. It is not simply a matter of consuming an existing interface: in many cases, the foundations for connecting have to be built together.

Demand and day-to-day work steer the project towards centralisation software. We set aside economic and contractual intermediation between restaurants and marketplaces and focus on connecting their operations.

Apetitus becomes Sinqro. Under that brand, we grow as a middleware SaaS: years of development, connections and learning about what happens between sales channels and the point of sale.

Sinqro adds online ordering websites. To deliver them, we also build the catalogue, ordering and payment technology needed for a complete sales experience.

But other website providers are among those integrating with Sinqro. To protect that relationship, we withdraw the public website offering under the Sinqro brand and continue supporting existing sites behind the scenes. Technology can keep delivering value without always taking the commercial spotlight.

That experience opens another path: delivering complete solutions under other companies' identities. Early agreements are developed discreetly, including a collaboration with a national bank, without turning this capability into Sinqro's public offering.

This work evolves into the group's white-label solutions. Vlanqa brings together the middleware offering, online sales and applications. The partner sells the solution under its own name, while Volqan develops the underlying technology.

AI tools make it easier for more people to turn industry knowledge into digital products. They also multiply the applications that need to connect to existing systems and handle critical processes.

We see a clear opportunity: a creator may want to design their own user experience without rebuilding everything behind it. Opening our engines lets us provide business logic, data management and APIs for those products, as well as support engineering teams that need to move faster.

By late 2025, requests from the industry lead us to develop engines for operational needs beyond channel integration. The aim is to make specialised capabilities available without requiring each software provider to build them from scratch.

We develop these capabilities to strengthen point-of-sale software and other business applications: helping their providers extend their products while keeping control of the customer relationship and user experience.

During 2026, we formalise Volqan as a group and organise the technology into three ways of using it: engines for building or extending software; engines and applications sold under another company's brand; and finished products under our own brands.

These are not three steps a customer has to follow. They are options for companies taking different roles: developing, selling or using a solution. Transactional businesses form a fourth area: we take part in our customers' economic operations with our own buying, selling and payments businesses.

The reorganisation in the fourth quarter of 2026 separates the Sinqro product from the integration and distribution infrastructure. That infrastructure takes on its own identity as OpenQloud, the group's GDS for hospitality.

Sinqro continues as a product. OpenQloud makes it possible to offer the connection layer independently, so other products can build on it without adopting Sinqro's applications.

The fourth quarter of 2026 brings together Volqan's reorganisation and the rollout of its product catalogue: a shared technology foundation offered as engines, white-label solutions and own-brand products.

In parallel, under the Apetitus brand we return to the commercial intention of 2015: participating in the economic flows of food sales and facilitating the relationship between restaurants and channels. Other services arise from the group's own operational needs and are opened to third parties when they can solve the same problem for them.