A cloud kitchen – also known as a ghost kitchen or shared kitchen – offers restaurant owners and food entrepreneurs commercial kitchen space for food delivery and take-out at discounted rates. This trend has been swirling around the restaurant industry. More food entrepreneurs are turning to cloud kitchens to reduce operating costs and capture the explosive growth of food delivery.
CloudEats, a Manila-headquartered startup that operates cloud kitchens in the Philippines and Vietnam, has raised a $7 million Series A round led by Nordstar to accelerate the digitization of food services in Southeast Asia.
After a successful launch in Vietnam earlier this year, the startup plans to expand into Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia by 2023, co-founder and CEO Kimberly Yao said in an interview.
“The tremendous growth of our Vietnam business over the past two quarters is very encouraging,” Yao said. “We’re taking best practices and key lessons into the next market launch.”
The cloud kitchen market in Asia is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 14.2% from 2021 to 2027. The food delivery market in Southeast Asia is expected to reach $49.7 billion by 2030, up from $15.2 billion in 2021.
When the startup raised its Series A in October 2021, it had seven Cloud Kitchen locations in the Philippines. It works now 25 ghost kitchens in the Philippines and Vietnam, Yao told TechCrunch. The revenue has grown 4x from October last year to April this year, Yao said.
The latest funding will allow CloudEats to develop its brands, grow its team and invest in shared kitchen technology.
CloudEats co-founder Iacopo Rovere said the company’s key focus in the next 12 months will be to develop integrated SaaS solutions for food services and strengthen brand building and marketing efforts. He has it now. More than 30 brands in the Philippines and more than 20 in VietnamBurger Beast, Eats 24/7, including Sulit Chicken, Pia Kitchen and Healthy Appetite, and is expanding its portfolio.
Image Credits: CloudEats
CloudEats has a hybrid cloud kitchen and cloud restaurant model where the company is not only an infrastructure operator but also owns digital native brands.
“Today, we own and operate more than 50 online-optimized restaurant brands that we exclusively create and manage throughout the Philippines and Vietnam,” Yao told TechCrunch. “Our proprietary smart kitchen technology Integrating with food delivery platforms allows us to scale and grow the business faster.
A serial entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in retail R&D and on-demand e-commerce, Yao co-founded CloudEats in 2019 with Iacopo Rovere, former CEO of Foodpanda, based in Berlin and with extensive experience in food delivery services. India. CloudEats claims to have delivered more than 2.5 million orders.
Along with the previous round of $5 million, the latest round brings the total funding to $14 million.
“As a global investor in the cloud kitchen space, we occupy the white space in the Southeast Asian food delivery market with our investment in Cloud Eats,” said Kimberley Ong, principal at Nordstar. “CloudEats generates the best brand and kitchen-grade economics we’ve seen in the market, all thanks not only to the company’s sophisticated technology and operations backbone, but also to the team’s unique data and partnership-based approach to brand building.”
