KUALA LUMPUR: Fave, southeast Asia’s leading mobile payments and rewards platforms, has enlarged its digital reach by acquiring two table ordering startups FoodTime and CutQ.
The acquisitions came on the back of the firm raising US$20 million in Series B funding led by investors Sequoia Capital, Venturra Capital and SIG Asia investment, last year.
Malaysia-based FoodTime is a mobile food ordering and delivery, while CutQ is a Singaporean food takeaway app that enables its users to skip queues and have their food ready for pickup.
In a statement, the firm said the acquisition and integration of both FoodTime and CutQ will allow Fave to significantly accelerate its growth in Southeast Asia, positioning itself as the region’s one-stop solutions platform for merchants and their customers.
"As the cost to operate restaurants increases and business owners face challenges to hire staff and increase productivity, we wanted to provide table ordering and take away pre-ordering solutions which will reduce these hurdles," Fave Group founder Joel Neoh said.
He said the firm saw an opportunity to leverage on the knowledge and technology that CutQ in Singapore and FoodTime in Malaysia have developed and are delighted to officially introduce their services as its next value-added service for merchants and users.
"At Fave, we believe every business should be able to partake in the digital economy, and no one should be left behind because the cost is too high or the technology is too complex," he said.
Co-founder Yeoh Chen Chow said acute labour shortage, coupled with new government restrictions on foreign workers, remains one of the biggest problems facing Malaysia and Singapore’s food and beverages (F&B) and retail industry.
“With Fave, we have seen an impressive growth where merchants have experienced a 70 per cent increase in loyalty return rates from their customers as compared to the industry average of around 20 per cent. Adding table ordering solutions on our platform is a step towards addressing what merchants in F&B need,” said Yeoh.
Table ordering is powered by FavePay mobile payments which also provides loyalty cashback to consumers and returning customers for merchants.
For the quarter ended 31 March 2019, Favepay transactions crossed the six million mark with the app downloaded over four million times and some US$6 million worth of cashback were also issued to users.