Singapore's Cata Raises $5.3M to Help F&B Escape Platform Fees

A Singapore startup just banked US$5.3 million to answer a question every food and retail operator in Asia is asking: what happens when you stop renting your customers from a third-party app and start owning them yourself?

Cata, founded in September 2025, raised an oversubscribed seed round led by Portage, with White Star Capital, 468 Capital, FoodLabs, FJ Labs, Rally Cap, and Iterative also participating. Less than a year in, the company has a marquee customer and expansion plans stretching from Singapore to Germany.

The speed of that raise signals strong investor appetite for this particular bet.

The Platform Fee Problem No One Talks About Honestly

Here is the math quietly breaking restaurant economics across Asia. Third-party delivery platforms charge 15 to 30% base commission. Add payment processing, promotional placement fees, and delivery charges, and the all-in cost can exceed 40% of revenue per order. For a typical Singapore F&B operator running on a three to five% net margin, that arithmetic is existential.

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The commission is only half the problem. The other half is the data. When a customer orders through Grab or foodpanda, the platform keeps the purchase history, the contact details, the reorder patterns. The restaurant gets the revenue, minus the fee, and nothing it can use to build a relationship.

That is the asymmetry Cata is selling against.

What Guzman y Gomez Found Out

Cata's platform lets merchants launch branded native mobile apps covering ordering, payments, loyalty, promotions, and CRM without custom development costs or long build timelines. Speed and ownership at a price point mid-size operators can afford.

Guzman y Gomez Singapore put that to the test. The Mexican food chain deployed Cata's branded app across all 23 of its Singapore branches in 2025. The result was more than double the digital sales it had before, with double-digit monthly growth recorded almost every month since launch.

That is not a marginal improvement. It is the kind of performance shift that travels fast through an industry.

David Brunier, Cata's CEO and former CMO of Foodpanda, framed it plainly: "The tools needed for F&Bs and retailers to digitize operations have been out of reach for too long. They're either too costly, too complex, or too fragmented to deliver results and drive ROI."

Why Investors Think This Is Bigger Than Food

Portage partner Jake Bodanis described the thesis in terms that go beyond restaurant technology. "We see a clear shift toward businesses prioritising ownership of their customer relationships and data as a core driver of growth," he said.

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Retail media is now the fastest-growing media channel globally, expanding at 17.5% annually, fueled almost entirely by first-party data from owned digital channels. Brands that control their own apps have that data. Brands that rely on aggregators do not.

Singapore government figures cited by Cata add urgency: nearly two thirds of F&B businesses that ceased operations had been registered for fewer than five years. Owning your customer channel is not a growth strategy. It is a survival strategy.

What This Means for the Agencies in the Room

Food and drink app downloads nearly hit 2 billion in 2024, growing 11% globally and 18% across Southeast Asia. The consumer behavior is already there. What has been missing is an affordable path to building branded experiences on top of it.

Cata is betting it has found that path. And with an oversubscribed round at under a year old, the market seems to agree.