The rise of delivery services gives customers more options, but means chaos for busy restaurants that need to manage orders across multiple apps and channels. Many kitchens deal with this problem by combining multiple devices at once, one for each application. Klikit wants to save Southeast Asian food businesses from “hell tablet“By aggregating order information from all apps into one platform. Based in Singapore, the startup just got out of stealth mode with $2 million in pre-initial funding.
The round was co-led by Global Founders Capital and Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Gentree Fund, AfterWork Ventures, Reshape Ventures, Nordstar, Pentas Ventures, Moving Capital, Gojek co-founder Kevin Aluwi, NasDaily’s Nuseir Yassin, YouTuber Lazar Beam and Radish Novel founder Seung-yoon Lee. Strategic angel investors include executives from Gojek, YouTube and Flash Coffee.
Since its launch seven months ago, klikit’s SaaS platform, klikit Cloud, has been used to serve over $2.8 million in orders for over 150 brands in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore , Taiwan and Australia.
Current users include Bistro Group (the Philippines franchisee of TGI Fridays, Hard Rock Cafe and Buffalo Wild Winds, Flash Coffee, and ghost kitchen startups) MadEats and Just Kitchen.
Klikit was founded in 2021 by Christopher Withers, who has extensive experience in on-demand space — he was previously GoJek’s vice president of market, chief strategy officer at Bangladeshi ride-hailing platform Pathao and launched UberEats in Asia Pacific.
During the pandemic, while at GoJek, Withers moved home to Australia to work remotely. He also owns and operates a ghost kitchen.
Withers told TechCrunch he’s always been fascinated by the food delivery space.
“I started my ghost kitchen because I always wanted to really experience the hardships of running a restaurant, instead of sitting hypothetically on the sidelines or from behind my laptop as I build a lot. this app supermarket,” he said.
During that time, Withers was overwhelmed by the number and cost of platforms, devices, software, advertising and social media he had to juggle. Therefore, he wanted to find more efficient ways to manage them and launch new brands.
Withers explained that existing F&B software is not suitable for many delivery restaurants and cloud kitchens, and that less than 2% of sellers in Asia have integrated their delivery orders with the legacy point-of-sale system. This leaves kitchens and staff to manage orders across different apps and devices, which is not only time consuming, but also leads to missed orders, errors, confusion, and general chaos. .
“Many operators call this ‘tablet hell’, and some of our customers have up to 20+ devices — taking up the entire pantry real estate value — for a single kitchen location. !” Withers said.
klikit’s team
Klikit differentiates itself from legacy POS systems, which were created for single brand companies, by allowing restaurants and ghost kitchens to manage multiple food brands across locations and channels on one device. be single. Features include menu updates on delivery apps, which klikit can do quickly as it has official API agreements with apps like GrabFood, foodpanda, GoFood and UberEats. It allows on-demand access to historical data analysis (in contrast, many F&B software systems restrict data to time-limited views), including daily sales, mixed product and channel analysis.
As many restaurants in Southeast Asia typically process delivery orders through social media such as WhatsApp, SMS or audio messages, klikit also allows these orders to be added to the dashboard. orders so that they are included in its analysis.
If one of klikit’s customers has spare capacity and equipment, they can sign up to gain access to its virtual brand partnerships with creators and consumer brands. Klikit is currently working with creators with a combined 38 million followers in the Philippines and Australia to launch two “creator software” by the end of 2022. Withers says klikit has already connected people top YouTube users because they have the power to compete with the fast food, marketing-wise giants.
Klikit’s closest competitors include Deliverect and NextBite, but Withers says he believes a regional startup like klikit will be successful because it can forge API partnerships with apps large distribution.
The startup’s new capital was used in stealth mode to hire 30 people in six countries. It will also use the capital to expand the region and add more features by building its engineering team.
In a statement, Paul Santos, managing partner at Wavemaker Partners, said: “We see klikit solving widespread unresolved problems for restaurateurs everywhere, while also creating A unique solution for creators and brands to earn revenue and engage with fans in whole new ways. Their vision strategically brings together the unique and converging trends that are growing in food delivery and the creative economy. “
