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Coffee tech start-ups keep VCs awake during tech winter
Southeast Asia's coffee tech start-ups are securing funding and branching out to maximize profitability, pushing café culture against the tide of the "tech winter" in other sectors.
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A promotional image features various types of coffee beverages offered at Kopi Kenangan, a grab-and-go coffee chain brand managed by Indonesia’s Kenangan Group. (Kopi Kenangan/-)
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echnology-powered coffee companies, also known as coffee techs, continue to bag new funding, seemingly unaffected by the recent tech winter even as many other start-ups across industries saw their funding dry up.
Singapore-based coffee chain Flash Coffee raised US$50 million Series B funding from several investors led by White Star Capital, according to a statement it released on May 11.
Flash Coffee said it operated 92 stores in Indonesia and that all of them had been profitable. The number of stores in Indonesia comprise half of all outlets it operates across the Asia-Pacific.
“We have found a solid product-market fit and are eager to expand our presence into additional cities in Indonesia to further drive sustainable growth,” David Brunier, Flash Coffee founder and CEO said in a statement.
The start-up plans to use the fresh funds to double down on tech and product innovation, improve sales and achieve “level-growth profitability” by 2024. This includes expanding its chain of offline stores to Surabaya following its success in Bandung, its first outlet outside Jakarta.
Read also: Meet Slamet, a vendor from Kampung Starling who sells coffee from his bike
Indonesia is the second largest consumer among coffee exporting countries after Brazil, according to data as of May 2021 from the International Coffee Organization (ICO), grinding through around 5 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee annually.
