Meta, YC join $1m seed round of SG-based WhatsApp ordering platform

Take App, a Singapore-based ecommerce enabler, has raised US$1 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and Meta.

Take App founder Youmin Kim / Photo credit: Take App

Founded last year, Take App’s main offering is a website builder that helps merchants receive orders and payments, with direct integration into WhatsApp. To process transactions, the startup partnered with Stripe to offer localized payment methods such as PayNow in Singapore and GrabPay in Malaysia.

The platform also allows online sellers to send newsletter-like broadcast messages to their customers.

Take App provides the service for free, but it will charge users for premium features such as custom domain names and more advanced analytics.

In a statement, the startup said that it has acquired 1,000 merchants from 35 countries, with most of them coming from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The majority of its clients are restaurants, but the firm also has bakeries, grocery sellers, and beauty salons among its userbase.

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Take App was established by former Facebook engineering manager Youmin Kim. The usage of chat apps like WhatsApp for shopping was not a foreign idea for him, as he worked on Messenger commerce and marketplaces for the global tech giant. That’s also where he learned about small merchants in Southeast Asia.

Kim told Tech in Asia that he aims to serve small merchants with a digital gap in Southeast Asia, with some not even having access to emails or laptops. “Our challenge is to find balance between difficulty and functionality. We frequently sacrifice functionality for easier use,” he said.

The company is one of the Southeast Asian startups that joined Y Combinator’s Winter 22 cohort. It plans to use the fresh funding to run experiments on its offerings and find its product-market fit.