Vietnam F&B procurement firm completes seed round from Genesia Ventures, others

Kamereo, a Ho Chi Minh City-headquartered business-to-business procurement platform for restaurants, has raised US$500,000 in seed funding from Japan’s Genesia Ventures and Velocity Ventures Vietnam.

The startup will use the money to further develop its platform and services. It also plans to expand its operations to Hanoi.

Kamereo was founded in June 2018 by Japan-born Taku Tanaka. He moved to Vietnam in 2015 to become the chief operating officer of Japanese-Italian restaurant Pizza 4P’s.

“I found purchasing and sourcing tasks for restaurants to be labor-intensive and inefficient when I worked in Pizza 4P’s. I believe this challenge can be solved using technology,” he said.

Kamereo claims to be the first integrated procurement platform for the food services industry in Vietnam. But startups like Zeemart, FoodMarketHub, and Lapasar are already doing something similar in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia.

While Kamereo will focus its efforts in Vietnam for now, it’s eyeing a series A round to fund its entry into other Southeast Asian markets by 2020.