The story
A platform built by hospitality people, not VC people.
We started in Madrid in 2018 because we kept hearing the same thing from every operator — whether they ran a tasting-menu restaurant, a gastropub, or a cocktail bar that didn't close until four: "I have eight tabs open and none of them talk to each other."
The food and the drinks worked. The marketing, the Google profile, the menu PDF emailed around, the ranking nobody knew how to read — that's what kept owners up at night. So we built a review tool. Then a Google profile tool. Then a rank tracker. We watched the same operators install all three.
The lesson was uncomfortable: the right product wasn't another tool. It was the layer that tied them together. A single screen for a single operator, whether they're plating in a kitchen or shaking on a service bar. One bill, one login, one source of truth.
We waited until the edge stack was good enough to host that layer at hospitality prices. By 2026, Cloudflare's combination of Workers, D1, Vectorize, and AI Gateway made it possible to run an AI-native, globally-fast SaaS for the cost of a mid-range VPS. That's when ALTO became inevitable.
ALTO means elevated, high, refined in Spanish. It's also where every plate — and every glass — goes, eventually: up to the pass. The name is the brief.