April 20, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] JAKARTA -- Indonesia’s restaurant listing and review app Qraved is poised to tap into other lifestyle categories this year, according to its CEO. 

“They include leisure, movies, travel, beauty, health, and all kind of different categories that you would do with friends and loved ones. That’s where we see Qraved expanding this year,” Steven Kim, co-founder and CEO of Qraved told The Investor in a recent interview at its headquarters in Jakarta. 

To do so, Qraved will be tying up with scores of transactional platforms such as delivery, payment and discount players, to become the “one-stop” shop for its around 2.7 million active monthly users. 

Earlier this month, the firm announced a partnership with Go-Food, Indonesia’s ride-hailing giant Go-Jek’s food delivery service. Qraved users can click the “order now” option on the app and get food delivered to their doorsteps via the Go-Food service. 

Qraved CEO Steven Kim    Park Ga-young/The Investor

“We are covering every experience when it comes to during the week, weekend and whenever you are looking for food or are craving and entertainment, making it easier to discover restaurants and shopping malls nearby,” he said. “Because you can discover everything here, we are now connecting with different transaction platforms.”

Kim is a self-confessed foodie who founded Qraved in 2013 with Adrian Li and Sean Liao, his colleagues from Rocket Internet, a German-based company builder. Qraved -- which began as a restaurant booking service -- has grown to a team of 50 and expanded into a full listing platform like Yelp, plus creating food video contents like Tasty. 

The Korean-born serial entrepreneur -- who in the past launched three online startups Zalora, Wimdu and OfficeFab -- is betting big on Indonesia’s large, young population of 250 million. 

“Indonesia can become the next China, where the whole transaction side will be replaced by mobile phones,” he said. 

That’s why Qraved’s strategy, at the moment, is to focus more on cementing its market leading position in the archipelago, and less on regional expansion. 

“When we raised US$8 million dollar (in Series B) two years ago, it was possible for us to go regional at the time,” he said. “But our conscious decision was Indonesia is going to be big and it’s going to very tough. So we needed to utilize all our capital to do all the experiments to figure out Indonesia. We want to own this market first.”

After taking a slice of Indonesia’s food industry, Qraved will seek a global rollout, including Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines, as well as Kim’s home turf. 

Qraved CEO Steven Kim Park Ga-young/The Investor

On the investment side, Qraved is seeking to get more funding in the future. It has raised over US$9.3 million total, from high-profile investors such as US-based Richmond Global Ventures, Shanghai-based Gobi Partners, Jakarta-based Convergence Ventures, 500 Startups and Korea Investment Partners. 

“I believe this year or the next, it would make sense to raise more to really grow our business that we expanded into, and also to build machine learning data tech capacity,” he said, adding setting up a sizable engineering team in Korea is also on the list.

Qraved was recently named by the country’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology as one of 44 startups that could become the next unicorn in Indonesia by 2020, dubbed the “Nexicorn.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility to fill the shoes. But we are actually confident,” he said. “(Becoming a unicorn) is the byproduct. If we do our job right, I am sure we will be.”

By Park Ga-young and Ahn Sung-mi (gypark@heraldcorp.com)  (sahn@heraldcorp.com) 


This story was sponsored by the Samsung Press Foundation. - Editor