In September 2020, while restaurants across Singapore sat empty, three founders were doing something they did not want to talk about. Jonathan Lim, Pua Yong Xiang and Jeremy Lee had hired an adviser and begun speaking to potential buyers for Oddle, the company they had started six years earlier. Bloomberg reported it, and the founders stressed that talks were early and they might simply keep the business.
It is not hard to see why selling was on the table. Oddle had launched in March 2014 as a subscription tool that let restaurants take orders online under their own brand, not under someone else's. The pitch was good. The numbers were slow. For the year ended March 2018, revenue was S$1.8 million, up 57% on the year before, but the company lost S$2.3 million. Across three years it had raised only about S$5 million from backers such as SPH Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and Quest Ventures. Small money for a company trying to out-run giant delivery apps that charged restaurants heavy commissions.
The pandemic shut dining rooms and sent owners hunting for any way to sell direct.
The early model had also needed rethinking. Oddle started as a white-label e-commerce provider for food and beverage operators, and over time widened into something larger: e-shops, reservations, QR ordering, payment terminals and managed marketing. The idea was to help a restaurant own its customers, not rent them from a delivery platform.
Then came the part that nobody could have planned. The pandemic shut dining rooms and sent owners hunting for any way to sell direct. Oddle's restaurant partners went from US$21 million of sales through the platform in 2019 to US$144 million in 2021. The company reported US$18 million in revenue for the year ended March 2021, which it described as 17 times the year before.
The founders who had been shopping the business now had a business worth keeping. In May 2022 Oddle closed a US$5 million round led by Altara Ventures, and launched Oddle Eats, a food discovery app. It said it served more than 5,000 restaurants, cafes, bars and hotels, from Les Amis Group to a local PizzaExpress franchise, and planned to push deeper into Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The lesson is uncomfortable and useful. Six years in, with small revenue and steady losses, these founders reached for the exit door. They were not wrong to look; they were wrong only about what the market was about to do. Staying alive long enough, on thin money, kept the company in the room when the room suddenly changed. The founders never claimed to have seen it coming, and that is the honest part: sometimes a company is saved by a decision to wait one more year.