Kamereo secures $4.6 million to expand food supply chains in Vietnam

Kamereo frees up restaurateurs to focus on customer experience by taking over issues related to sourcing

The Ho Chi Minh City-based company is the country’s first busines-to-business (B2B) food platform to use technology to optimise sourcing and purchasing in the burgeoning food and beverage (F&B) industry. The platform quickly connects buyers to farmers, allowing each to speed up the lengthy process of delivering fruit and vegetable supplies to the kitchen.

The company has grown by 15 per cent every month in the last 12 months despite mobility restrictions and temporary closure of some business. Kamereo attributes its rapid success to the surging local F&B industry which has shown a steady compound annual growth rate of more than 10 per cent, as well as segment players’ growing discernment on sustainably and ethically-sourced goods and the country’s overall positive management of the coronavirus pandemic.

Long-term Japanese expatriate Taku Tanaka launched Kamereo in 2018 with a clear vision: to redefine the food business by letting chefs and restaurateurs focus on serving the best culinary experiences to customers while leaving the nitty-gritty of supplier negotiations, order processing, and management to the Kamereo team. Currently, Kamereo has about a hundred employees serving more than 400 active customers who buy regularly from the platform.

As Kamereo is actively apportioning part of its new funding towards hiring new team members, the company has released an introductory deck to help people learn more should they wish to join the startup’s journey.

As well as increasing the company’s manpower to better accommodate the growing number of users, Taku is aiming to use the new funding to bring Kamereo to Hanoi next year, build a new Warehouse Management System to optimise daily operations, and continuously upgrade the user experience and service quality of its website and mobile app (available on the App Store and Google Play), as well as expanding tech coverage to allow the in-house engineering team to make fast, data-driven decisions. In the long term, Kamereo aims to become a one-stop procurement platform for F&B businesses.

Goh Yiping, partner of Quest Ventures said, "We are very impressed by Kamereo's execution, in-depth supply chain, and market knowledge in the farm to fork space in Vietnam. Kamereo sits in one of the largest food production hubs of Southeast Asia, and there is much room to grow in solving many of the inefficiencies of the supply chain today, improving farmers' livelihood outcomes and procuring the best products for businesses and homes."

Meanwhile, Takahiro Suzuki, general partner of Genesia Ventures said, "We are proud to be the earliest investor in Vietnam’s leading B2B food platform and have seen how Kamereo grew and made a positive impact on the local F&B industry especially in the past year during the pandemic. We will continue to support Taku, Hiroshi, and the Kamereo team in achieving their vision 'Redefine the food business'."