A cloud kitchen — also known as a haunted kitchen or shared kitchen — provides restaurant owners and food entrepreneurs with commercial kitchen space at a lower cost for food delivery and takeout. This trend is circling the restaurant industry. More food entrepreneurs are turning to cloud kitchens to lower their operating costs and capture the explosive growth of food delivery.
A startup headquartered in Manila called CloudEatsthat operates cloud kitchens in the Philippines and Vietnam just raised a $7 million Series A extension led by Nordstar to accelerate the digitization of food service in Southeast Asia.
After its successful launch in Vietnam earlier this year, the startup plans to further penetrate 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 business in Vietnam over the past two quarters is very encouraging,” said Yao. “We’ll be taking the best practices along with the key lessons to our next market launch.”
The cloud kitchen market in Asia is expected to grow at 14.2% annually from 2021 to 2027; the food delivery market in Southeast Asia is expected to reach $49.7 billion by 2030an increase of $15.2 billion in 2021.
The startup had seven cloud kitchen locations in the Philippines when it lifted its Series A in October 2021; it works now 25 haunted kitchens about the Philippines and Vietnam, Yao told businesskinda.com. According to Yao, the sales volume in Vietnam has grown 4x since April this year compared to October last year.
The latest funding will also enable CloudEats to develop its brands, grow its team and double-invest in shared kitchen technology.
CloudEats co-founder Iacopo Rovere said the company’s main focus over the next 12 months will be enhancing its suite of integrated food service SaaS solutions and strengthening brand building and marketing efforts. It now has more than 30 brands in the Philippines and more than 20 in Vietnamincluding Burger Beast24/7 Eat, Sulit Chicken, Pia’s Kitchenand Healthy appetiteand is expanding its portfolio.
Image Credits: CloudEats
CloudEats has a hybrid cloud kitchen and cloud restaurant model where the company is not only the operator of the infrastructure, but also the owner of the digitally native brands.
“Today, we own and operate more than 50 online-optimized restaurant brands that we create and operate exclusively in the Philippines and Vietnam,” Yao told businesskinda.com. “Our patented smart kitchen technology integrated with food delivery platforms allows us to quickly scale and grow the business.”
Yao, a serial entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in retail R&D and on-demand e-commerce, co-founded CloudEats in 2019 with Iacopo Rovere, former CEO of Foodpanda, who has an extensive background in food delivery services in Berlin and India. . CloudEats says it has taken more than 2.5 million orders.
Together with the previous $5 million round, the latest capital brings total funding to $14 million.
“As a global investor in the cloud kitchen space, we are conquering the white space in the food delivery market in Southeast Asia through our investment in CloudEats,” said Kimberley Ong, principal at Nordstar. “CloudEats generates the best brand and kitchen-level economy we’ve seen in the market, thanks not only to the company’s advanced technology and operational backbone, but also to the team’s unique data- and partnership-centric approach. in brand building.”
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