Smartbites Raises US0K VIA ECF Funding To Expand Corporate Offerings

AI-POWERED food delivery startup SmartBite has recently raised approximately US$100,000 (RM418,000) via a successful equity crowdfunding campaign on the pitch IN platform.

This brings a total investment of over US$700,000 for the food-tech company, which previously raised around US$300,000 from two series of funding alongside strategic investment from Magna Capital, Rhombus Food Holdings, Eric Ryd, Noodle Digital and angel investors from Asia and Europe.

SmartBite – as you may recall – is a more unique take on the food delivery service industry. Rather than allow users to order anywhere and anytime, SmartBite only delivers to offices and has set delivery periods covering lunch and dinner.

They also only offer a limited choice of rotating meals daily, curated using artificial intelligence (AI). This only alleviates the frustration of choosing your meals during work, but also to allow their partner restaurants to more effectively prepare them. As such, SmartBite is able to do away with delivery fees and minimum orders.

“Since the inception of SmartBite, we grew to better understand both the psychology of a corporate employee in the business districts as well as unit economics of food delivery. These lessons learned have definitely helped us fine-tune our business model and we are now achieving a daily average gross profit margin of 15% to 20%,” says SmartBite chief executive officer and co-founder Gabriele Fadda (pic).

“By leveraging on technology such as AI and machine learning, SmartBite is dedicated to simplifying how working professionals eat and helping them save time and money.”

Corporate help

These services are set to expand. According to the company, the fresh round of investments will be used to expand its corporate offerings in catering and employee benefit programs.

The idea is to help companies manage their F&B requirements for events, meetings and other corporate activities. Rather than deal with multiple F&B suppliers and vendors, corporates only need to directly engage with SmartBite.

The catering solution will be leveraging on SmartBite’s existing technology to help manage large corporate food orders. The company intends to work with human resources departments by giving them access to the logistics and management tools within SmartBite, meant to simplify the logistics of company-wide food-ordering as well as to aid working with multiple food vendors.

That’s not all. By working with HR departments, SmartBite also wants to offer a daily allowance on the platform as part of employee benefit programs. In this case, food can serve as a literal carrot on the stick.

“With our success in growing our user base among the working crowd in Kuala Lumpur as well as the feedback and data we have gathered, we identified a gap in the market when it came to corporate solutions for food,” Fadda says.

“We are increasing the bulk of our logistics from delivering meals of 20 pax to almost 1000 pax on a single trip. Not only does it provide stable sales for our restaurant partners, but this expansion of corporate offerings also provides a one-stop solution for companies and their employees to get great food delivered affordably and conveniently right to their office.”

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