Restaurant booking app Eatigo wants to take a bite at Asia

KUALA LUMPUR: Eatigo, a restaurant reservation app that expanded into Malaysia in March, is aiming to be one of the few Southeast Asian companies to successfully scale across Asia.
The app allows users to book a table in restaurants ranging from fast-food chains, mid-range restaurants, hotel buffets and high-end restaurants, at discounted rates of between 10% and 50% during non-peak hours. The company charges merchants a flat fee rate per dinner, which is its income.
Eatigo Co Ltd was incorporated in Singapore and has its headquarters in Thailand. It has a strong presence in the two countries, with claims of 95% and 50% market share in Thailand and Singapore respectively, ahead of other players such as Off-Peak and Chope. The app has seated over 2 million diners in Thailand (launched in 2014) and Singapore (launched in 2015). It launched its Hong Kong leg along with Malaysia.
"There are not many successful Southeast Asian companies that have scaled across Southeast Asia. Grab is a laudable exception, but in food nobody has done it," said Michael Cluzel, Eatigo's co-founder and CEO.
There are many food players out of Southeast Asia that have gone to other countries but not many them managed to produce meaningful revenue outside of their home market," he said.
"If you are trying to build a business that is transactional based, what better thing to build it around than food that everybody in the world has three times a day," he added.
Cluzel said the company, which counts Trip Advisor as its main investor, aims to break even in less than two years upon beginning operations in a certain market, and become profitable as soon as it can, and has thus far done so in Thailand and Singapore.
Cluzel, who declined to share user numbers for Malaysia, claims the app managed to reach "milestone" reservation numbers in 10 days here, compared with nine months in Thailand and eight months in Singapore.
Eatigo, which has signed up 110 Malaysian merchants so far, focuses on restaurants which already have a strong presence here. Merchants are bound in a one-year contract with Eatigo to engage its service.
The company has run two funding rounds thus far, in which it attracted US$15.5 million (RM68.3 million).