Taiwan's point-of-sales startup iChef raises $5.6 million in series A funding

The company has 1,080 paying customers, reports Tech in Asia

Street food heaven Taiwan is getting a tech upgrade, courtesy of Taiwanese startup iChef. It has cooked up an iPad-based restaurant point-of-sales (POS) system which has been scoring customers. 1,080 restaurants are using its product, each paying on average $80 a month (that’s a monthly revenue of $86,400).

The company has raised series A funding worth $5.6 million from AppWorks, CDIB, and CTBC Venture. In total, it has gotten $7 million since its inception in 2012. 

In co-founder Ken Chen’s words, iChef’s advantage lies in being a product designed “by restaurants, for restaurants.” CEO Sean Hsu started a beef noodle shop and found existing POS systems unsatisfactory. That led to iChef. It has an offline mode to ensure the business stays running even though the internet is down.

The bulk of iChef’s customers are Taiwanese restaurants, with a smattering from Southeast Asia (the funding will go towards getting more customers in this region). It’ll also use the investment to build an analytics tool for restaurants. 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.