Taiwan’s iChef discloses $1.5M funding round from supermarket mogul

iChef, the Taipei-based startup that offers an iPad-enabled POS (point-of-sales) service for restaurants, has disclosed a US$1.5 million investment from Lin Ming-Hsiung, chairman of Pxmart, one of the island’s biggest supermarket chains.

While the round was closed last July, the company has not made it public until now. Pxmart’s current CEO Hsu Chung-Jen (who once served as the general manager of President Chain Store Corporation, a major food and retail conglomerate) also contributed to iChef’s seed-size round, but the company says it has no formal ties to the food vendor.

Co-founder Ken Chen tells Tech in Asia that the retail background of iChef’s investors fit more closely with some of the internet investors it met.

“We often hear about the term online-to-offline, but POS is more offline than online – in fact, it’s more about taking offline businesses and putting them online,” says Chen. “When we were looking for investors, we wanted someone with patience. iChef will not boom in one or two years, but we will keep growing,” he adds.

iChef is a POS app that Chen and three other co-founders built to serve the island’s new class of business-savvy restaurateurs. Since its launch in 2012, Chen claims that iChef has scored more than 500 clients in Taiwan, the overwhelming majority of whom are pay for it via monthly subscription fees. It also has clients in Hong Kong, and has doled out trial services with restaurants in Thailand and Tokyo.

Many SaaS companies in various verticals offer their software for free, in order to drive adoption and saturate the market. This is arguably best exemplified by Slack, which climbed its way to a US$2.8 billion valuation, partly due to its generous free tier. iChef is bucking the trend a bit by charging restaurants from the get-go. But Chen says that this makes sense for the company because the upfront investment increases the likelihood of loyalty.

“There were a couple of VCs that suggested we just give the product away for free, build up our client list, and increase our valuation,” says Chen. “But [in our view], it’s not about how many restaurants are in your list, it’s about how useful you are.”

Chen and his co-founders have also recently added a Square-esque payment service for restaurants using iChef. In Taiwan, barriers for adopting merchant credit card are similar to those faced by US-based small businesses. Chen is hoping that the new feature will help spur adoption among restaurants, but since iChef itself doesn’t charge a processing fee, it can continue to monetize through subscriptions to its core app.

Editing by J.T. Quigley, top image by Miss Meng