Jakarta, Oct 12: ESB, Indonesia’s only fully integrated restaurant operating platform has announced a US$7.6 million (IDR 110 billion) Series A+ funding round led by Alpha JWC Ventures, with participation from existing investors including BEENEXT, Vulcan Capital, AC Ventures, and Skystar Capital.
ESB is an all-in-one provider of culinary business operations software, connecting restaurants’ front-end, back-end, consumers, and supply chain partners.
“Restaurant business is a combination of manufacturing, trading, and retail,” Gunawan Woen, Co-Founder and CEO of ESB (pictured above, second from left) said.
“We strive to alleviate the headache of dealing with separate platforms to meet the needs of these different aspects, and at the same time help businesses generate better customer engagement, optimise their operations, and eventually increase their net profit.”
Established in 2014, ESB’s mission is to help F&B businesses increase their profits by incorporating technology to improve sales and operational efficiency.
Through the founders’ such as Gunawan, Eka Prasetya, Setiadi Prawiryo Moeljadi, and Dwi Prawira decades of experience in the F&B operations and supply chain, ESB has identified many pain points throughout the industry and created unique cloud based technology solutions.
The company was born from the founders’ frustrations when running their F&B businesses, particularly in using multiple software in operations.
ESB’s initial offering was a customised Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) cloud solution to replace expensive traditional hardware-based systems.
The company expanded its objectives and started working on an all-in-one restaurant operating system covering point-of-sale (POS) system and Mobile Ordering technology called ESB Order.
With ESB’s all-in-one approach, the founders want to ease and streamline operating processes, especially those with numerous outlets and consumer-facing channels.
ESB aspires to follow the success of Toast in the United States who recently had a successful IPO.
ESB has served more than 500 F&B brands, including big names such as MAP Boga Adiperkasa, Boga Group, Ismaya Group, Sour Sally Group, and Marugame Udon, processing more than 40 million orders annually.
With this fresh funding, ESB will further expand their proposition including tech enabled upselling features, enhanced business intelligence platform, delivery solutions, payment solutions, financing and human resources information system to become the dominant end to end F&B business operating platform.
Prior to this round, ESB had received a total of US$3 million funding from BEENEXT, AC Ventures, Skystar Capital, and Selera Kapital earlier this year.
Solutions for ever-growing F&B industry in the new normal
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed F&B businesses to optimise their operation more than ever, both by making their operations leaner and finding new avenues for sales.
This leads to massive digitisation efforts among all F&B stakeholders from restaurants to suppliers and the adoption of restaurant technology, which ESB is primed to tap into.
ESB managed to grow by three times YoY (year-on-year) during the pandemic mainly due to the demand for touchless ordering, which ESB caters to via its ESB orders.
ESB now processes over US$500M in gross transaction value, and is expected to grow ten times in the next two years.
Ultimately this is a testament to ESB’s ability to deliver values for their clients, helping them survive challenging times.
ESB is optimistic that restaurants will rebound after the COVID-19 impact, and ESB will be there to support restaurants embracing the new normal.
Beyond just enabling mobile ordering, ESB’s ERP and POS products have also proven to become a lifesaver for many F&B businesses by minimising leakage and human errors in the operation.
Presently over 95 per cent of ESB’s users use ESB for both the frontend and backend software, proving the demands of holistic optimisation.
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