Southeast Asian Restaurant Booking App Offpeak Gets $800,000

Offpeak, a Malaysia-based restaurant booking startup, has raised a Series A round of $800,000 led by Gobi Partners. The company will use its new capital to expand into Southeast Asian cities, starting with Bangkok, and find more restaurant partners.

As it name implies, Offpeak helps restaurants get reservations during less busy times. Customers can book a discounted table with as little as 10 minutes advance notice on its iOS and Android apps. Offpeaks serves up recommendations based on a user’s location, making it a discovery platform as well as booking service similar to OpenTable.

Co-founder Lau Ngee Keong says Offpeak plans to expand into three or four new countries over the next year. The startup’s goal is to serve smaller hole-in-the-wall vendors as well as establishments that already manage their own reservations.

“We were deliberate in ensuring that restaurant dining options are not limited to just fine dining or cafes and bistros. With such a diverse dining scene in this region, Offpeak can cater to not only the fine dining to casual dining cafes and bistro genres, but even to quick service restaurants and very local restaurants which usually would not accept reservations or are just operationally unable to cater for table specific reservations,” Lau tells TechCrunch.

He adds that this will help Offpeak stand out from other restaurant booking services, since most of its competitors serve businesses that are already able to handle their own reservations or use a group-buying model.

Offpeak has signed up 600 partners over the last 10 months, which the startup says is a tenfold increase since it launched in August 2014. It also claims that user numbers have increased 30 times since it opened for business, with an average 50 percent month-on-month growth in bookings.

The company is still hashing out a monetization or revenue-sharing model and says that its near-term focus is on growth in Offpeak’s target markets