Former Rocket Internet executives Adrian Li, Steven Kim and Sean Liao today announced the launch of their new startup, an online dining directory called Qraved. The three founders are known for their roles in Zalora Singapore, OfficeFab and Wimdu across South East Asia for German-based internet company, Rocket Internet. Although Qraved hasn’t disclose their list of investors, but they told DailySocial that Silicon Valley investor 500startups are on board.
The trio sees a strong demand in the lifestyle area specifically culinary in the emerging market of Indonesia, “with over 2,000 restaurants listed and thousands of searchable food pictures, Qraved helps diners find the right place to eat as well as the tastiest dishes to order”. Qraved focuses on the social side of the activity, providing high quality food photos, new restaurant discovery and of course blogger reviews as well as full menu descriptions that’s going to help users decide which restaurants to go to.
Of course this kind of app has been around in Indonesia for quite some time, there’s Urbanesia, Isikota, etc, but one thing that might be able to boost Qraved’s popularity is their ability to book a reservation via their service. “We noticed that many of our friends would post pictures of food on their Facebook timelines and that would generate a lot of likes. So we thought, what if we created a product that combined that with direct online restaurant booking?” Said Sean, who leads the Product Development at Qraved.
“We’re the first to try combining this concept of user shared photos of food and online booking for restaurants”, said co-founder Adrian Li who handles Marketing and User Engagement at Qraved.
Qraved.com has launched in Jakarta as per today and will soon expand to Bali and Surabaya. The company intends to enter other regional markets by next year.The founders think that given how social Indonesian people are, their love for photos and of course the growth of the culinary lifestyle, it’s just makes perfect sense for Qraved to be in Indonesia.
One startup, Tasterous, had tried this concept of combining photos and food/restaurant reviews in Indonesia back a few years ago, and although their product is very well executed, the marketing concept and user acquisition failed horribly, forced them to shut down the company not so long after they launched. Again, Qraved has a better concept (the reservation feature is a big plus), and managed by a group of people with extraordinary backgrounds, there’a a big chance that Qraved will gain traction.