Qraved
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Qraved was an Indonesian restaurant discovery and reservation platform founded in 2013 by Steven Kim, aiming to be Southeast Asia’s Yelp and OpenTable. It combined user reviews, professional food-critic content, food photography and table booking, growing to more than 20,000 listed restaurants and about one million monthly users across Jakarta and Bali.
02 / Qraved FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
The available evidence points to the classic marketplace death spiral: the restaurant reservation business in Southeast Asia was low-margin while customer acquisition costs stayed high, since restaurants treated an online presence as nice-to-have and diners had zero switching costs. Qraved never built a durable moat, and its value proposition was commoditized as Google Maps offered free discovery and super-apps integrated their own booking features.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Steven Kim founds Qraved in Jakarta as a restaurant discovery and reservation platform.
- Peak funding round
Qraved reports about one million monthly users and 20,000+ listed restaurants; it ultimately raises $15 million.
- Operations ended
Qraved collapses after eight years as the marketplace unit economics prove unsustainable.
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
Southeast Asia’s Yelp and OpenTable: restaurant discovery plus reservations
- 02
20,000+ restaurants and ~1M monthly users at peak; $15M raised
- 03
Low-margin reservations plus high acquisition costs
- 04
Commoditized by Google Maps and super-apps; collapsed in 2021