Alipay pours $15m into Chope as part of partnership to build mini apps

Chope, a restaurant management platform based in Singapore, has teamed up with Chinese tech titan Alipay to allow food and beverage (F&B) businesses to build their own mini apps on Chope’s platform.

The partnership comes with a roughly US$15 million capital injection from Alipay, Arrif Ziaudeen, CEO of The Chope Group, told Tech in Asia. While he didn’t share other financial details, he said the amount is part of an ongoing funding round.

Cherry Huang (left), Alipay’s general manager for global merchant partnership, South and Southeast Asia, and Arrif Ziaudeen, CEO of The Chope Group / Photo credit: Chope

Through the new offering, Chope said that restaurants will be able to reach millions of users more effectively and digitalize their operations more rapidly by leveraging Alipay’s technology. With the pandemic shaking up the F&B industry, digitalization is a key factor in keeping restaurants open for service, according to Ziaudeen.

Even before the collaboration with Alipay, Chope has been helping its over 5,000 restaurant partners across seven cities globally to bring their presence online. Through Chope, restaurtants can support reservations, offer deals, upload their menus, and manage tables on a single platform.

Ziaudeen said that what the Alipay partnership brings new to the table is its customizability and expanded features.

Through the mini apps on Chope, restaurant operators will be able to support or remove functionalities such as accepting payments through wallets, accepting orders in real time, scheduling pickups for orders, among others. They can also design how their pages will look, what fonts it will use, and what colors and icons to display.

The digitalization process can start from restaurants simply uploading their menus and include specifying what functionalities they want to add to their pages. Chope will handle the back-end technology.

The partnership will also let larger brands expand online and try out newer markets more affordably, as it offers an alternative to building a whole app by themselves, noted Cherry Huang, general manager of global merchant partnership for Alipay in South and Southeast Asia.

Alipay is aiming to bring its mini-app technology and know-how to more collaborations with other companies in various industries, she added.

Next stop: unicorn

The strategic partnership and investment comes after a major shakeup in the global F&B industry brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the impact of Covid-19 on Chope seems to be dissipating as it saw a 42% growth in revenue for the first half of this year compared to the same period last year, Ziaudeen told Tech in Asia. He added that Chope’s contribution margin also turned positive for the first time.

Given this trajectory and the Alipay tie-up, Chope is setting its sights on becoming a unicorn – a startup with a valuation of at least US$1 billion – in two to three years.

“[The] markets that we operate in – namely, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, and China – have been in lockdown at various times over the last the last 18 months. Of course, [it] has negatively impacted [our] revenue,” Ziaudeen explained.