Remember the last time you got excited to order your favorite dish on GrabFood? But then, you see that it's not available — the restaurant ran out of ingredients!

Never again. With Malaysia's Food Market Hub, restaurants can automate purchasing and inventory tracking, and it just raised $8.5M in its extended Series A.

• Customers include major restaurant groups Din Tai Fung, Putien and Yum Brands (KFC and Pizza Hut franchises) and coffee chains % Arabica and The Coffee Academics.

Who cashed in? AC Ventures Malaysia (backed by Penjana Kapital), East Ventures, Gojek's Go-Ventures, 500 Global, SIG, Velocity Ventures and Capital Code.

🌶 Spicing it up

Just one restaurant outlet processes about 200 purchases for ingredients every month. This is difficult, time-consuming and can lead to tons of errors like running out of ingredients (or wasting them!).

• FMH's solutions bring back a ton of $$$ to profits.

The numbers show. At $600M, the total annualized value of orders on FMH's marketplace jumped over 4x in the past 12 months. It has also hit 5,000 active users, double its 2020 numbers.

👨🏻‍🍳What's the recipe?

Free marketplace. FMH operates a marketplace with over 1,000 suppliers (and growing). Like a grocery, any restaurant on its free plan can discover, message and order from suppliers.

• FMH makes money by processing online payments between restaurants and suppliers.
• Order through Whatsapp, FMH's system or email.

Paid plans. Around 60% of FMH customers are on paid plans for advanced features, including syncing external accounting and POS systems with FMH. A few below 👇🏼

• Never waste food again! Based on past data, know exactly how much to order with their forecasting system.
• Ditch Excel. With automated and integrated inventory management, you'll know exactly how much cash you're spending and how much food you're wasting.
• Goodbye receipt piles. Invoices and DOs get matched instantly.

🌏 International, baby!

With the new cash, FMB's doubling down on its expansions in Malaysia and Indonesia. We also hear it's heading to Singapore and Thailand by 2022.