Cata’s white label app helps quick service restaurants create their own customer-facing app, and backend solution
Rising costs. High delivery commissions. The constant struggle to acquire and retain customers. These are pain points every F&B operator in Singapore knows all too well.
Even Flash Coffee, once a rising grab-and-go coffee chain in the region, wasn’t immune to these challenges when it wound down locally two years ago.
But where some see dead ends, Flash Coffee’s founder David Brunier saw an opening.
Instead of walking away, he took the hard lessons from running hundreds of outlets and turned them into a new venture: Cata, a platform aiming to give F&B players a fast track to building their own consumer app.
Levelling the F&B playing field
David, who serves as Cata’s CEO, co-founded the company with Sebastian Hannecker, Flash Coffee’s former COO, and Marija Brunier, a former Foodpanda executive and his wife.
The white label solution lets F&B operators, from single-outlet cafes to multi-national chains, to launch their own branded mobile apps for ordering, payments, loyalty, marketing campaigns, and customer relationship management (CRM), giving them the tools to compete in a rapidly digitalising industry.
David sees Cata as a way to level the playing field in the competitive F&B industry.
He explained that while giants like Starbucks and McDonald’s can spend millions on proprietary apps to strengthen their competitive edge, most of the industry lacks the budget for such consumer-facing technology.
According to David, this leaves “99% of the industry” digitally underserved and dependent on fragmented solutions like paper loyalty cards, manual cashier orders, or costly and non-brand-centric third-party delivery platforms.
With its full-stack, no-code solution, David claims that F&B businesses can launch a branded mobile app in just “a matter of days.”
Customers can use Cata-powered apps to place delivery, takeaway, pre-order, or dine-in orders and pay via credit cards or digital wallets. In restaurants, diners can also scan a QR code at their table to order and choose to pay at the counter if they prefer.
Through these features, the platform gives smaller operators access to customer data that was previously limited to larger chains. Restaurants can track customer demographics, visit frequency and purchase behaviour, among others, gaining insights that can inform marketing strategies, improve customer retention, and strengthen loyalty programmes.
A battle-tested platform
Cata believes its solution is more relevant than ever—and increasingly critical for the survival and growth of F&B operators especially in Singapore’s competitive scene.
The company sees the potential for restaurants to achieve a “five to 10 fold return on investment” on Cata’s fees.
This can come from acquiring customers through digital channels (a challenge without the right tools), improving order frequency and retention with smarter loyalty programs, and boosting average order values through automated upselling and cross-selling.
At the same time, operators can cut costs by reducing their reliance on cashiers as customers can order and pay directly from their phones, at a time when operating and labour costs are becoming steeper in markets like Singapore.
To back this vision, Cata has already raised US$3.1 million from global investors including White Star Capital, FoodLabs, 468 Capital, FJ Labs, and Rally Cap.
Beyond the recent funding, Cata rests on a foundation of “over US$10 million” invested into the underlying technology stack by Flash Coffee.
When the coffee chain launched in Singapore in 2019, David’s goal was clear: make the chain fully digital, with a consumer app for ordering, payments, and loyalty rewards. Achieving that was no small feat—it was a huge investment for the brand, with the team dedicating 120 engineers full-time, along with product and design teams.
Once the app was live, large F&B chains begun inquiring about the technology, despite it being developed for a coffee brand. Their interest, according to David, revealed a clear gap in the market—a gap that ultimately led to Flash Coffee spinning off its underlying tech into the creation of Cata in 2024.
Because Cata was built on this “battle-tested” foundation, it didn’t have to start from zero. The platform has already processed millions of transactions across multiple markets, giving the team the freedom to focus on innovation, product development, and expansion.
This gives Cata a head start over typical startups that spend their pre-seed funds just building core technology—a gap Brunier is confident no competitor could close quickly, not even with AI.
Cata wants to fuel the growth of restaurants worldwide
Cata has already deployed its platform with Guzman y Gomez (GYG) in Singapore, where its apps are now live and operational across all of GYG’s outlets.
“In addition to GYG, we have teamed up with a number of prominent players who are about to go live with Cata, including local heroes like Grain Traders and up and coming chains like The Berry Spot,” David said.
For now, the team’s strategy is to focus on “established, renowned brands,” rather than starting with smaller independent operators in order to showcase the startup’s capabilities and to demonstrate that it is built for global scale and enterprise-level requirements.
As a next step, David is looking to enhance Cata apps with AI-driven features to automate marketing and growth, including analysing customer behaviour to suggest targeted campaigns, generating visuals and messaging automatically, and even launching promotions at the optimal time to maximise engagement and repeat orders.
Cata is also preparing to expand into developed markets across Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East, and while F&B chains remain the initial focus, other verticals like wellness, beauty, convenience stores, and specialty retail are on the horizon.
“Our long-term vision for Cata is to become the global infrastructure powering the digital storefronts of thousands of outlets,” said David.
Having founded and scaled Flash Coffee, David—who moved to the company’s advisory board after stepping down as CEO in Jul—draws on first-hand experience of the challenges F&B operators face. While the brand didn’t achieve lasting success in Singapore and Thailand, it continues to grow in Indonesia, providing insights that inform Cata’s approach.
“Every business you build as a founder has its own journey and offers invaluable lessons,” he said.
“Many of the challenges we faced as operators—both in the past and still today—directly inspired the decision to start Cata: to empower our peers with enterprise-grade technology that helps overcome these hurdles wherever possible.”
Featured Image Credit: Cata
