Southeast Asian tech startup StoreHub, a tech platform that enables restaurants and retailers to automate and grow their business, has announced that it has raised $13.5 million (about P781 million) in a pre-Series B funding round, which it plans to use “to strengthen its operations in the Philippines and the rest of ASEAN.”
The funding round was led by 500 Global with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, OSK, and others.
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Founded in 2013 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, StoreHub is a platform that provides retails solutions such as a cloud-based POS system to QR-based table ordering, loyalty, customer engagement, and more. The platform now serves over 15,000 retail and restaurant outlets across their key markets of Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and other countries.
In the Philippines, particularly, StoreHub is fast becoming the partner of choice for many restaurants, cafes, and retail stores to successfully automate their operations. It is one of the few point-of-sale system providers accredited by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).
SME merchants using the Storehub platform in the Philippines include multistore cafes like Coffee Academics and Tender Loving Cakes and restaurants and bars like Wagyu Studio and Kondwi.
In the last 12 months, StoreHub has processed over 128 million transactions worth over $1.6 billion in Gross Transaction Volume (GTV), a 40 percent increase over the previous year and a sign of the resurgent times.
“In the post-Covid rush to reopen, businesses have had to make new changes to adapt to the new normal. In line with this, the Philippines and the region have had to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies to meet the demands of the time,” StoreHub CEO and Co-Founder Wai Hong Fong said. “With ‘revenge travel’ and ‘revenge dining’, retail and F&B business owners are looking for ways to improve operational efficiency and maximize their revenue per customer. StoreHub enables business owners to make more money and get more time for their families, or to expand even more.”
According to a release, new paying stores that have onboarded the platform have also seen growth that has reached as much as 5x compared to the year before. Acquisition costs for new customers have also improved to near breakeven within the first month.
To match the surging demand, StoreHub has been expanding its team accordingly, bringing in over 100 new hires in the last six months. In 2021, StoreHub reached close to net profitability by growing average customer revenue throughout the pandemic.
“We joined their first round in 2016, with a small $150,000 check. Fast forward to today, we have invested more than $10 million cumulatively on top of that,” shared Khailee Ng, managing partner of 500 Global. “Considering similar companies like Toast are valued at $10.5 billion, StoreHub already has approximately a quarter of Toast’s customer size with another estimated two million more potential businesses in Thailand, Malaysia, and Philippines to onboard. This in turn creates the playbook for ‘rest of world.’ We believe StoreHub is incredibly valuable because it creates incredible value for so many more SMEs.”
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