Malaysian Food Delivery Startup Dahmakan Raises $18M

Dahmakan, a Malaysian food delivery startup that uses menus and cloud kitchens, has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round, according to a report by TechCrunch.

Participants in the round include Rakuten Capital, White Star Capital, JAFCO Asia and GEC-KIP Fund, food delivery app Woowa Brothers, Partech Partners and Y Combinator.

The startup was founded by former executives at Foodpanda, and it was the first startup in Malaysia to be a part of Y Combinator’s accelerator program.

Costs are generally high for food delivery companies, but Dahmakan takes advantage of cloud kitchens that are near customers to help keep costs down.

Dahmakan’s full-stack platform features an operating system that is end to end and oversees every part of its process, from developing a recipe to delivering the food to a person’s doorstep. It offers 40 dishes a week based on a database of about 2,000. The company picks its menu every week through customer data, food preferences and spending habits of customers.

CEO Jonathan Weins, when speaking with Business Times, said the company’s operating system helps the kitchens to be more profitable and operate more efficiently than competing quick-service restaurants (QSRs).

“By combining the entire value chain and removing the middleman, we capture the higher-quality and better operational efficiencies needed to be able to offer our customers a better-value product,” he said.

When ordering, customers get a menu and choose from a delivery time schedule. Other startups in the region, like Grain, are trying similar processes. Grain is backed by Openspace Ventures, First Gourmet and Singha Ventures.

“Dahmakan is well-positioned to serve the growing demand for food delivery services in Southeast Asia with its unique, technology-forward approach of taking control of the entire value chain to provide affordable delivery options to SEA’s rising middle class,” said Eric Martineau-Fortin, managing partner at White Star Capital.