East Ventures pours seed funding into Indonesian online kitchen startup

Food delivery is the digital sector with the highest adoption in Southeast Asia. The pandemic gave the segment a huge boost, as people were forced to stay at home. This was a trend across the region, including Indonesia.

However, despite the popularity of apps like GoFood and GrabFood, many people still frequent street-side vendors for their affordable meals.

The problem: A vendor usually offers only one kind of food item on its menu, and stalls typically vary in product quality and hygiene.

Uena co-founders Alvin Arief (right) and Roy Yohanes / Photo credit: Uena

Local food startup Uena tried to solve this by building a network of online kitchens that can deliver these meals directly to customers. It targets lower and middle-income segments, such as office workers, university students, convenience store employees, and couriers of food delivery apps.

Uena has just raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in a round led by East Ventures, with participation from IDN Media. The firm plans to use the fresh funding to build more kitchens in the Jakarta area.

In order to keep its food affordable – each of the dishes it offers has a US$1 price tag – the firm has tried to increase efficiency in kitchen operations through the use of cooking robots and handling last-mile delivery. It has also built its own app and allows customers to order via WhatsApp chat, which is currently the most popular ordering channel for the startup.

Serial food entrepreneur

Uena was founded by entrepreneurs Alvin Arief and Roy Yohanes.

Arief is not new to the Indonesian startup and culinary world. In 2010, he built a food-related daily deals platform called Lapar.com after he returned from his studies in the US. “At that time, daily deals were the best entry point to attract people to transact online,” Arief tells Tech in Asia.

However, after having raised some money from angel investors, Lapar.com eventually shut down.

Photo credit: Uena

It wasn’t a totally bad experience for Arief, as he decided to leverage his expertise in digital marketing and the food industry to build a new Korean restaurant called Mujigae, where he met Yohanes.

The restaurant became so popular, even amid the pandemic, that the two decided to switch from a physical restaurant to a cloud kitchen model. Arief said that he left Mujigae last year before building Uena.

Gradual expansion