(L-R) MadEats co-founders Keisha Lao (CPO), Mikee Villareal (CEO), and Andie Cruz (CMO)
MadEats, a cloud kitchen startup based in the Philippines, has secured US$125,000 in funding from the Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Manila-headquartered MadEats is the first cloud kitchen startup to be selected for the prestigious programme.
The foodtech venture also disclosed that it is currently in talks to raise a 7-figure USD in seed funding. “We have already raised one-fourth of this amount from some angel investors and former YC alumni. We target to close this round by September this year,” co-founder and CEO Mikee Villareal told e27.
In November 2020, MadEats bagged an undisclosed sum in pre-seed investment, led by Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, with the participation of Paymongo co-founder Luis Sia.
MadEats was launched in November 2020 by an all-female founding team of Villareal, Andie Cruz (CMO), and Keisha Lao (CPO) — who have been working in the F&B industry throughout their career.
An on-demand delivery-only restaurant group, it builds its food concepts, takes orders from its virtual storefront, and fulfills deliveries with its fleet of riders.
Since its launch in November, MadEats has launched three brands — Yang Gang, a Korean fried chicken shop; Chow Time, a Chinese takeout; and Fried Nice.
The company will soon launch its fourth concept focused on coffee. “We will launch high-quality coffee at affordable prices (Dot Coffee) and smash burgers, which are big competitive food categories in the Philippines,” Villareal said. The objective is to open five delivery-only brands by year-end.
The foodtech startup will also roll out a mobile app to enable consumers to order products and have them home-delivered.
“We hope to build the underlying infrastructure of ghost kitchens in Southeast Asia by creating products that are engineered specifically for delivery that can scale much faster with the help of technology,” Villareal shared.
MadEats will also be scaling its cloud kitchens across the Philippines in the recent future.
“So far, well over half of our revenue comes from our madeats.co platform. We hope to expand our operations to different areas in the Philippines by the end of the year and expand to other regions in Southeast Asia in the next few years. By integrating tech into all facets of our business, the focus of MadEats is to add value to the customer’s experience,” the CEO remarked.
The Philippine food delivery market is growing exponentially (~48 per cent y-o-y growth), the fastest in Southeast Asia, and is projected to hit US$8 billion by 2025. This growth is attributed mainly to the pandemic. With many of the country’s major cities still under lockdown and the resumption of dine-in services is uncertain, customers prefer ordering food online and have it home-delivered.
The cloud kitchen industry is still in its infancy in the Philippines when compared with fast-growing markets such as the US, the Middle East, and India, and even neighbouring Singapore and Indonesia. Grab was the first to introduce the cloud kitchen concept when it opened GrabKitchens in 2019. Grab has since been building more kitchens, some of which are built together with smaller startups as a co-branded kitchen, where these startups build the kitchen and Grab operates the digital front.
Other startups operating in the virtual kitchen space are Kraver’s Canteen (which aims to help brands navigate the different ways cloud kitchens can be used to grow their brands), and CloudEats (which is more geared towards the development of private label brands).
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Image Credit: MadEats
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