MadEats CEO Mikee Villareal (C) with the other two co-founders
MadEats, a cloud kitchen startup headquartered in Manila, the Philippines, has received an undisclosed sum in pre-seed investment, led by Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, with participation from Paymongo co-founder Luis Sia.
This marks Mateen’s third deal in the Philippines after his investments in PayMongo in September 2019 and Avion School in July 2020.
“Our pre-seed money will go into operations and marketing. We want to launch a handful of internet food brands by the end of 2020,” MadEats’s Co-founder Mikee Villareal told e27.
MadEats is an online restaurant group that creates brands specifically engineered for delivery.
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The company was set up amid the COVID-19 crisis by an all female founding team of Villareal (CEO), Andie Cruz (CMO) and Keisha Lao (CPO) — who have been working in the F&B industry throughout their career.
“During the pandemic, we witnessed the struggles of brick-and-mortar restaurants in pivoting their businesses to delivery-friendly formats,” Villareal said. “At the same time, we also saw a huge demand for on-demand food delivery, especially in the cloud kitchen space.”
The trio sniffed an opportunity and discussed creating online-only food brands. According to Villareal, MadEats wants to innovate brands engineered for delivery that customers can keep coming back to, through thoughtful user experiences. What this means is that everything — from the ordering platform and packaging to the food — has been created with the customer in mind.
“With the rise of on-demand food delivery and the increased habit of eating at home, we believe that the future of F&B is online, and delivery is here to stay,” Villareal said.
First brand
Villareal believes that cloud kitchens enable one to launch food brands quicker, and is an opportunity for founders to scale faster.
The startup has rolled out its maiden brand, Yang Gang, which she claims is a “painfully addictive Korean Fried Chicken brand”. Launched a week ago, Yang Gang aims to bring the Korean street food experience to customers — all packed into a box and delivered to the customer’s convenience.
Yang Gang
Before the year-end, MadEats aims to launch two more brands — Lucky Chow, a fast casual Chinese concept; and Fried Nice, a progressive fried rice brand focused on inventive takes on the comfort food staple.
While there are a handful of cloud kitchens such as CloudEats and GrabKitchen in the archipelago, Villareal differentiates itself by being a product- and consumer-centric internet restaurant group that is agnostic towards any digital platform.
The market size
The on-demand food delivery of Southeast Asia is expected to grow 4x by 2025, from US$4 billion to US$8 billion, according to a research from Dataspring. During the pandemic-induced lockdown, there was a huge spike of new users for online food delivery.
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“The Philippines has one of the fastest growing internet economies in the region with its internet economy standing resilient at US$7.5B. It has 73 million active social media users, who spend an hour more than the average social media user in its neighbouring countries,” she remarked.
With the Philippines having one of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world, there was an obvious exponential growth for the food delivery market.
However, challenges are aplenty, admits Villareal. “With the rise of more and more food concepts, the market can be quite saturated. Aside from this, there are so many things to consider in operations, especially with the nature of our business being delivery-heavy.”
“You also have to consider traffic, the weather and internet access — all of which can harm the dining delivery experience of a customer, in spite of these things sometimes being out of our control. But we also know how to take a step back and look at the things that we can change in the experience,” she concluded.
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Image Credit: MadEats
The post (Exclusive) All female-led MadEats ropes in Tinder co-founder as investor to scale its internet food brands in Philippines appeared first on e27.