Much gratitude to Theodora Sarah Abigail for covering our story in the startup feature series of Tech in Asia.

The article touched upon the problems that we are trying to solve, i.e. the rising operational cost of the F&B industry, keeping up with the spending data, and the hassle with managing numerous suppliers (up to 20 or 30 suppliers for each restaurants). It then switched gear to how our founders, Keith & Neeraj conceived Zeemart after their 2016 departure from Wunderman, where Neeraj served as the group's managing director while Keith was the company's executive creative director for Southeast Asia.

As per the article, we intend to keep Zeemart free forever. Why are we doing so even though we have had customers insisting to pay because of how useful we are to their organisation? Taking the cue from Neeraj, "We believe that with a larger number of customers, we would be able to offer premium services for those who require them. We are taking a longer-term approach." These premium services consist of consolidated same-day delivery and the access to longer credit terms through invoice factoring which we have begun piloting with a few selected customers.

On the other hand, we are also helping the F&B Suppliers by reducing the amount of late payments and unpaid credit tabs that are plaguing the industry. With Zeemart's Supplier Hub, F&B suppliers can easily set up their product catalogues with details like minimum order quantity (MOQ), current inventory, delivery fees, and trackable delivery schedules plus integration to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

What's next? We're currently in talk with some venture capital funds across Southeast Asia to raise another round of US$11 million to ramp up our operations in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, and also the expansion to Thailand, Philippines, and India.

Read more at: https://www.techinasia.com/singapore-startup-fb-procurement-piece-cake