A TECH platform for restaurants and retailers in Southeast Asia, StoreHub has raised $13.5 million in fresh capitalization to bolster its operations in the Philippines and the rest of the region with the easing pandemic situation.
According to StoreHub CEO and Co-Founder Wai Hong Fong, businesses have to transform to adapt to the new normal as the economy reopens with the emerging post-Covid period.
“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. With ‘revenge travel’ and ‘revenge dining,’ retail and food and beverage business owners are looking for ways to improve operational efficiency and maximize their revenue per customer,” he said.
Leveraging on this, “StoreHub enables business owners to make more money and get more time for their families, or to expand even more,” he noted.
The pre-Series B funding round was led by 500 Global with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, OSK and others. For the top investor, this capital raising activity is among the first of its many “really big bets” in top-performing companies.
“We joined their first round in 2016, with a small $150,000 check,” recalled 500 Global Managing Partner Khailee Ng. “Fast-forward to today, we have invested more than $10 million cumulatively on top of that.”
Considering that StoreHub already has approximately a quarter of customer size of big players like Toast, with a valuation of $10.5 billion, plus another estimated 2 million more prospective businesses in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines to go onboard its platform, “this in turn creates the playbook for ‘rest of world,’” he added.
“We believe StoreHub is incredibly valuable because it creates incredible value for so many more SMEs [small and medium enterprises],” Ng said. The tech startup was cofounded by Fong with Congyu in 2013, pioneering cloud-based point of sales (POS) systems in Southeast Asia. Since then, the platform has powered over 15,000 paying retail and restaurant outlets in the region and expanded its offering to include QR-based table ordering, loyalty, automated customer engagement and more.
StoreHub has processed more than 128 million transactions worth over $1.6 billion in gross transaction volume in 2021, or 40 percent higher than the previous year. The firm already had reached close to net profitability last year by growing average customer revenue throughout the pandemic.
New paying stores on the platform have grown five times from a year ago. They already have experienced a near break-even in acquisition costs within the first month.
In meeting the strong demand for online channel providers, StoreHub has been expanding its team accordingly, bringing in over 100 new hires in the last six months.
The company’s latest funding round will also be used to continue drive its growth and technology innovation to deepen the value of each customer.