Kim Teo ate out nearly every meal. That small habit became a company. She would scroll through restaurant Instagram pages to see what the dishes actually looked like, then be left with a couple of questions to ask staff. Restaurants, she noticed, avoided putting photos on menus because it looked tacky.
The quiet part of her story is that Mr Yum was not her first try. She had started Simply Borrowed, a bridesmaid dress hire platform. She had built Neighbour Flavour, an app to buy home-cooked meals from people nearby, and she stopped working on it in 2016. She co-founded a start-up incubator, Pitchblak, led a network for women founders in Melbourne and mentored at the Melbourne Accelerator Program. Years of learning, in other words, with no hit.
A pilot at three venues drew up to a quarter of customers within days.
Mr Yum came in November with co-founders Kerry Osborn and Adrian Osman. They decided on a plan and launched a basic version within weeks: dish photos, plain explanations of unfamiliar ingredients, filters for diets. It ran in a web browser rather than an app, because, Teo said, people hate downloading apps. Her advice to founders was blunt: do not build the Rolls-Royce product.
A pilot at three venues drew up to a quarter of customers within days. The site had about 20,000 monthly users and 100% month-on-month growth. They had asked investors for A$700,000. They closed A$1.5 million, double the target, from angels, the hospitality group Australian Venue Co and venue owners.
Then the pandemic turned a nice-to-have into a necessity. Venues needed contactless ordering, and QR codes were everywhere. In 2021 Mr Yum raised A$11 million, led by TEN13 with AirTree, followed by a Series A that Australian press put at A$89 million, though aggregators list less. By 2022 it had gathered more than A$100 million in venture capital.
The price came next. With growth money gone cold, Mr Yum cut about 17 percent of its staff, the harshest cuts among the Australian rivals at that point. In September 2023 it did something many said would fail: it merged, all stock, with rival me&u, with Teo as chief executive. The combined group covered more than 6,000 venues across Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the United States, and processed more than A$2 billion a year. By 2024 Teo was talking about getting through the messy first year and coming out profitable, and about an almost even split of old Mr Yum and me&u staff.
What the record gives a first-time founder is the pattern of Teo's earlier attempts. Two small ventures that did not scale were not wasted. They were rehearsals for the third one, which made a real hospitality customer's problem the starting point.