Point-of-sale startup scores seed round thanks to crowdfunding

Photo credit: Florian Plag.

Singapore-based startup Sphere announced today it has raised a seed round worth US$252,000. The funding was made possible by Fundnel, a Singapore-headquartered company that enables private investment in startups. Investment in Sphere came from Start Up Nation and Start Global Ventures.

(UPDATE: This story has been updated with comments by Sphere co-founder and CEO, Christopher Cai.)

Sphere was founded by Christopher Cai, a developer who has had a hand in several startup products like streaming video platform Viddsee, and Timothy Han, who is experienced in the food and beverage (F&B) industry and is the director of Singaporean restaurant brand Palm Beach Seafood.

The co-founders were old army friends who believed in open, versatile solutions for business-to-business (B2B) tech products, Christopher tells Tech in Asia. “Tim’s background, experience, and knowledge in the F&B sector in Singapore allowed us to start first with this sector,” he adds.

Sphere’s product includes tablets, a payment system, and cloud storage.

The startup will use the funds to hire marketing and sales people in Singapore as well as Malaysia, where it wants to expand next year.

Sphere makes a point-of-sale (POS) system for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the F&B sector. It’s an offering similar to Taiwan-headquartered iChef, which raised US$5.6 million in series A in February.

Sphere says it provides the software and the hardware for it, including table management software, a waiter app, a payment system, cloud storage, tablets, routers, receipt printers, and so on. The startup claims it can offer all these goods and services while also keeping costs low for its customers.

“There is a clear need for growing F&B SMEs to not only have an integrated POS system with various apps, but an integrated POS platform where different components are modular and switchable, and new components are easy to discover,” Christopher says. At the moment, when a business wants to change one component in its POS system, it has to swap the whole thing, which is costly and a nuisance, he adds.

In the future, it wants to enable restaurants to integrate data across multiple systems. “There are a lot of amazing apps and services out there targeted at addressing retail and F&B pain points, such as reservation, loyalty program, and mobile waiter apps,” Christopher says.

“Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for F&B owners with limited staff resources to manage multiple systems and provide good service at the same time. Our goal is to become a platform for our app partners.”

The startup has an annual revenue in “a good six-digit range since December 2015,” according to Christopher. Revenue growth has been 20 percent above what the company expected since closing the seed round, he adds.