Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 51. Published 17 September 2026. Guest: Cancan Liu, co-founder of allO. Host: Lars Markull.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Cancan, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you actually located?
Cancan Liu: Hi Lars. Super excited to chat with you today, and very happy to do the podcast. I'm currently based in Munich. Our headquarters is in Munich, and we also have another office in Berlin. We are a German company.
Lars Markull: We met a couple of weeks ago at the Stripe Sessions here in Berlin. I've followed your company for a little longer already, spending my time in embedded finance. Any kind of vertical software-as-a-service company is one I try to have on my radar, so I'm really glad to finally have you here and learn more about your business, and specifically your embedded finance offering. But maybe to kick things off, you can tell me and the listeners a little more about allO. We can see your company logo here in the video, so this is pretty much on brand, but give us the pitch. How would you describe allO to a new person?
Cancan Liu: Super happy to do so. The name allO comes from a very simple phrase, all-in-one. What we offer is an all-in-one solution for local restaurant owners in Germany and Europe to run their business. Why does this matter? Because gastronomy is a very fragmented market, filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of different types of solutions. If you interview local restaurants today, you walk in and you'll see they work with seven to ten different software vendors to manage their business. The tech stack is very fragmented, and none of it is integrated. And then you look at the profile of a typical local restaurant owner. Most of them are not tech-savvy. In fact, they hate technology. But they end up juggling all kinds of software to run their business. We came in and said, look, how about I give you everything you need digitally to manage your business, and you just focus on the guests and the food, and we take over the rest. That is what we do at allO.
From a QR code to an all-in-one platform
Lars Markull: For me, or one of the listeners who never operated a restaurant or never really understood what happens there, can you give us some practical examples? What exactly are the features or activities that the restaurant owner or their employees handle with allO?
Cancan Liu: Right. The easiest way to explain this is to share the story of allO. We started allO as a completely different product on day one. So far the company has gone through four stages, and we evolved into where we are today because of the problems and feedback we saw in the restaurants.