THE fact that kravve.co, an impact driven software-as-a-service enabled marketplace, has successfully raised RM1.25 mil (US$306,206) should be music to the ears of home cooks and small food businesses.
Founded two years ago, kravve.co is the largest moms and pops food & groceries marketplace in Malaysia with over 1,000 sellers across Malaysia currently.
Very simply, Kravve’s mission is to empower locals to make a living from their home selling food & groceries and to encourage locals to buy from locals.
“We help automate the manual selling process end-to-end, making 16 steps process into just two steps with tech automation,” commented kravve.co CEO & co-founder Teh Yong Lin.
“This way moms and pops have more time to make more products, and sell more of them. We are empowering micro-sellers to make a full income from home with a website simple enough to create in five minutes that comes with full e-commerce capability.”
kravve.co announced today that it attracted the confidence of 159 investors with 11.11% of total equity offered through pitchIN, Malaysia’s leading equity crowdfunding (ECF) platform. The highest individual investment value was RM222,500 (US$54,270).
“The pandemic was definitely a factor in accelerating digital transformation. COVID-19 has pushed small businesses over the technology tipping point and transformed their businesses forever,” Teh pointed out.
‘With our platform, they are able to service more clients than they can ever imagine before and solve their headaches of having to manually handle each order that comes in for them.”
A one-stop marketplace that gathers all micro-sellers/home chefs across the country, Kravve’s long-term aim is to level the playing field between small sellers and supermarkets, thus enabling local sellers an equal opportunity to get discovered.
During its last financial year, the company grew 10 times from its consumer facing business despite being traumatised by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the company being targeting to grow 10 times more to scale 10,000 sellers.
kravve.co also targets for its sellers to increase their sales by bridging the corporate procurement gap with the platform.
Through kravve.co, corporations can procure from thousands of local sellers across the country. Their clients can range from small-medium enterprise to government-linked companies (GLCs), conglomerate and Fortune 500 multinational companies.
“With the success of our fund raising exercise, we are positive with our future expansion plans which includes an allocation of 20% of funds to cater to our first foray beyond the Malaysian shores into Singapore, marketing efforts (35%) and allocation towards building manpower strength (45%),” added Teh. – May 3, 2021.
