Fastbee
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Fastbee.sg was a Singapore food-delivery startup founded in early 2017 by Khoo Kar Kiat (with Deric Lim, Hidayat Rohaizad, and CTO Hang Zhicheng), incubated by NTUitive. Instead of restaurant delivery, it sold affordable local hawker food — chicken rice, prawn noodles, zi char — with a twist: customers ordered lunch online and picked it up from vending machines at industrial and business parks in Singapore's west (Mediapolis, Science Park, Block 71). It expanded to eight machines and took 10,000 deliveries within months, but ceased operations in 2018.
02 / Fastbee FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Fastbee could not withstand Singapore's hyper-competitive food-delivery market: GrabFood, Foodpanda, and Deliveroo dominated with deeper pockets and broader offerings, leaving Fastbee no room to establish a significant presence. It also failed to raise the additional funding needed for expansion and technology, and maintaining and updating its vending-machine network proved costly — eroding the cost-efficiency the model was supposed to deliver.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Fastbee ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Khoo Kar Kiat founded Fastbee.sg in Singapore in early 2017 (NTUitive-incubated): an online portal where office workers ordered affordable hawker food and picked it up from vending machines at business parks.
- 02
The startup expanded to eight machines at Mediapolis, Science Park, and Block 71, taking 10,000 deliveries within months.
- 03
Facing dominance by GrabFood, Foodpanda, and Deliveroo, an inability to raise more funding, and the costly upkeep of its vending-machine network, Fastbee ceased operations in 2018.