The proliferation of delivery services gives customers more options, but also means chaos for restaurants that need to manage orders across multiple apps and channels. Many kitchens handle this by fitting multiple appliances at once, one for each application. Clickit wants to save Southeast Asian food businesses from “tablet hell” by aggregating order data from all apps into one platform. The Singapore-based startup has come out of stealth mode with $2 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was co-led by Global Founders Capital and Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Gentry Fund, AfterWork Ventures, Reshape Ventures, Nordstar, Pentas Ventures, Moving Capital, Gojek Co-Founder Kevin Alui, NasDaily’s Nusayer Yassin, YouTube’s 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, Clickit’s SaaS platform, Clickit Cloud, has been used to deliver more than $2.8 million in orders to 150 brands in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan and Australia.
Users currently include Bistro Group (a Philippine franchisee of TGI Fridays, Hard Rock Cafe and Buffalo Wild Wind), Flash Coffee and ghost kitchen startup MadEats and Just Kitchen.
Clickit Founded in 2021 by Christopher Withers, who has a wealth of experience in the in-demand space – he was previously vice president of marketplaces at GoJek, chief strategy officer at Bangladesh ride-hailing platform Patao, and launched UberEats in Asia Pacific.
During the outbreak, Withers moved home to Australia to work remotely at GoJek. He also owns and operates Ghost Kitchen.
Wiers told TechCrunch that he had always been fascinated by the food delivery space.
“I started Spirit Kitchen because I wanted to experience the challenge of running a restaurant first-hand, rather than sitting on the sidelines or speculating behind a laptop while building a lot of these super-app marketplaces,” he said.
At that time, Withers was overwhelmed by the number and cost of tools, equipment, software, advertising and social media. As a result, he wanted to find more effective ways to manage them and launch new brands.
Withers explains that existing F&B software is not suitable for many delivery restaurants and cloud kitchens, and that less than 2% of merchants in Asia have integrated their delivery orders with a legacy point of sale. This forces kitchens and staff to manage orders across multiple apps and devices, which is not only time-consuming, but also leads to missed orders, mistakes, confusion and general chaos.
“Many operators call this ‘tablet hell’ and some of our customers had as many as 20+ devices – an entire panther closet’s worth of real estate – for one kitchen space!” Withers said.
The klikit group
Clickit differs from legacy POS systems designed for single-brand companies by enabling restaurants and gourmet kitchens to manage multiple food brands across locations and channels on a single device. Its features include updating menus in delivery apps, which Clickit can do quickly as it has public API agreements with apps like GrabFood, foodpanda, GoFood and UberEats. It provides on-demand access to historical data analysis (in contrast, many F&B software systems limit data to time-limited views), including daily sales, product mix and channel segmentation.
Since many restaurants in Southeast Asia often process delivery orders via social media such as WhatsApp, SMS or voice messages, Clickit allows these orders to be added to the order dashboard so they are included in the analysis.
If one of Clickkit’s customers has spare capacity and equipment, they can sign up for virtual brand partnerships with creators and consumer brands. Clickit is now working with creators with 38 million followers in the Philippines and Australia to launch two “creator drops” in late 2022. According to Wiers, Clickkit is connected to YouTube’s top users because of its ability to compete with fast-food giants, marketing. – Wise.
Clickkit’s closest competitors include Deliverect and NextBite, but Wiers believes a regional startup like Clickkit will succeed because it can forge API partnerships with major delivery apps.
The startup’s new funding was used in stealth mode to hire 30 people in six countries. It will also use the capital for regional expansion and building the engineering team by adding more features.
In a statement, Paul Santos, managing partner of Wavemaker Partners, said, “We see Clickit solving a wide range of unsolved problems for restaurateurs everywhere, as well as creating unique solutions for creators and brands to monetize and engage with fans in entirely new ways. Their vision strategically brings together the interconnectedness and growing trends in food supply and the creative economy.
