Co-founders Tan Ban Eu and Lau Ngee Keong launched a platform called Offpeak last year that essentially helps users discover restaurants and incentivises them with dining privileges. Interested consumers can simply open up the Offpeak app every time they want to dine out and the app will provide them with appropriate dining suggestions and privileges.
The app also enables customers to book a reservation a month in advance or just up to 10 minutes before the actual dining time slot. And it also incentivises them with dining privileges that they can use to get a good deal for any time of the day.
Once a customer reserves a dining slot through the platform (available on both mobile and web), a confirmation email will be sent to them that they can present to the restaurant’s staff upon arrival.
“We aim to help restaurateurs increase their bottom line by attracting new customers and increasing the dining frequency of customers,” Tan Ban Eu said.
From the time they launched Offpeak.my in August 2014, it has grown to become one of the largest restaurant discovery and dining privileges platforms in Malaysia.
“We have more than 950 restaurant partners in Malaysia, spread across 7 states (Wilayah, Selangor, Penang, Kedah, Perak, Melaka and Johor) and growing, to offer users with dining privileges of up to 50% off,” Lau Ngee Keong said, “We continue to maintain our leading position in the market, and this funding is timely for us to enhance our local team and marketing efforts.”
In an effort to further fuel their growth efforts and to provide greater value to both their customers and restaurant partners alike, they managed to secure the CIP 500 grant from Cradle Fund. CIP 500 is a seed fund that primarily funds commercialization of budding companies by offering up to RM500,000 per deal.
This fund essentially offers an advanced level of commercialisation support that enables the recipients (companies) to conduct business processes such as monitoring, mentoring, market access, product refinement and capacity training.
With regards to this, Tan Ban Eu said, “We are excited that Cradle Fund shares our belief in the strong potential of Offpeak and would like to thank Cradle Fund for awarding us the CIP 500 fund to continue to scale both in terms of operations capabilities and in restaurant partnerships in Malaysia.”
This cash injection of RM500,000 comes only about six months after Offpeak raised their Series A round of financing worth US$800,000 from Gobi Partners. Gobi Partners is a leading venture capital firm that has an investment focus on early-stage, digital media, IT and TMT companies. You can read more about the steps Offpeak took to secure such a valuation.
Although Offpeak is headquartered in Malaysia, it continues to make a push for market domination in other Southeast Asian nations like Thailand and Singapore. Offpeak was first launched as a responsive web app in Thailand in July 2015, and a mobile app followed suit this month and it includes more than 250 restaurant partners in Chiangmai and Bangkok.
Also, they launched Offpeak in Singapore this month and the platform is currently offering dining privileges of up to 50% off from partner restaurants in Singapore.
The founders attribute their growth and their success in achieving such milestones to an intricate balance of a scalable business model, the right partners and the “win-win” ecosystem that Offpeak offers to both restaurateurs and users.
Offpeak is accessible on the web, Play Store and App Store.