Nabi Muratbek

How a Kazakhstani Integrator Is Helping Develop Online Sales for the Restaurant Business

Kwaaka, a cloud-based solution that integrates delivery services with restaurants’ POS systems, entered the market in May 2022. Today, less than two years after its launch, the company works with 1,200 restaurants in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Armenia and is preparing to enter the Georgian market.

The Kazakhstani startup owes its unusual name to the quokka, a unique Australian marsupial known for its distinctive “smile,” which appears as a result of the relaxation of its jaw muscles.

“We want to see the employees of restaurants and aggregator companies, as well as our partners, happy and smiling. If our product makes their work easier, minimizes errors, and saves time, then the end users will be satisfied, and so will we,” explain the project’s co-founders, Nabi Muratbek and Maksat Kadyrov.

An Open Niche

By the time Kwaaka was founded, both entrepreneurs already had experience working in startups.

Nabi, a 24-year-old native of Zhezkazgan, moved to Karaganda with his parents at an early age and grew up in the country’s mining capital. After completing his first year at Nazarbayev University majoring in mathematics, he decided to build his future in IT.

At the same time, he became interested in the startup industry and, several months later, joined Rakhmet, a project of the Chocofamily holding, as a data analyst.

Although his time at one of Kazakhstan’s first major and successful startups was relatively short, it proved to be a valuable learning experience. During his second year, Nabi joined one of the Big Four companies and simultaneously launched his own HR project, Recruitment.ai, which Forbes Kazakhstan covered in its No. 10 issue in 2020.

The project lasted a little over a year and eventually shut down for a reason common among startups: it ran out of money.

“We didn’t have enough funding to find the right business model. I was considering other projects and seriously thinking about moving to Canada. I spoke with people who had experience living and working abroad. That’s how I met Maksat, who had spent seven years in the United States and several months in Canada,” Nabi recalls.

Thirty-year-old Aktobe native Maksat Kadyrov, a graduate of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, left Kazakhstan in 2016. He earned a master’s degree in Computer Information Systems from California University of Management and Sciences.

After an unsuccessful experience with an AI startup, he joined a company developing websites for real estate agents. Eventually, however, he left a stable job with the prospect of obtaining a green card sponsored by his employer and joined a startup founded by entrepreneurs from the CIS.

The project’s mission attracted him: providing access to justice for people with low or no income. But the startup eventually shut down. After experiencing his own story of bankruptcy in the United States, Maksat returned to Kazakhstan. Some time later, he went back to the US with his wife.

After a month of unsuccessful job searching, the Kazakhstani received three offers from American companies at once. He chose LinkedIn, where he worked for three years as a senior software engineer. In 2021, he met Nabi.

“There is an expression in English that describes a feeling of belonging to a place — somewhere I belong. Unfortunately, during the seven years I spent in the United States, I never developed that feeling. There was certainly an element of madness in leaving a prestigious position at a major international company, but I really wanted to return to Kazakhstan,” Maksat admits.

The idea of creating a solution for managing food delivery seemed the most viable of all the ideas they had at the time. The niche for similar products was practically empty, so the entrepreneurs began developing Kwaaka.

To better understand the problems restaurant owners faced, Nabi and Maksat went “into the field” themselves: they worked behind restaurant counters and in call centers. This hands-on approach paid off. They gained a deeper understanding of the processes and learned what mattered most to cashiers and administrators.

“We have never built a product based on illusions. We relied on actual market needs, and that is our main value,” the founders emphasize.

For a long time, delivery was not considered a particularly important source of revenue for Kazakhstan’s restaurant industry. A few orders a day did not make much difference to overall revenue. The arrival of international aggregators changed everything, followed by the pandemic and lockdowns, when properly organized delivery became, without exaggeration, a matter of survival for restaurants.

Escaping the Chaos

When a restaurant agrees to work with a delivery aggregator, it receives a dedicated tablet. If the establishment works with several aggregators, it needs several tablets.

Before Kwaaka, restaurant employees had to manually enter orders from these tablets into the restaurant’s POS system, Nabi explains.

If a restaurant receives only a couple of orders a day, this does not create major difficulties. But as order volumes increase, so-called “tablet chaos” inevitably appears. This leads to errors, canceled orders, and lost revenue.

Another important advantage is time savings. Before Kwaaka was connected, it could take 10–15 minutes from the moment a customer placed an order until that order reached the kitchen. After integration, the process takes only a matter of seconds.

Everyone benefits. Customers do not have to wait an additional 15 minutes, while restaurants reduce their operational costs.

Many aggregators also have a time limit for accepting orders. If a restaurant fails to accept an order within five minutes, the order is canceled and the restaurant has to pay a penalty.

Kwaaka also makes stop-list management — the list of temporarily unavailable dishes — much more efficient. Changes to a restaurant’s menu appear in the aggregators’ systems almost immediately. This reduces the likelihood that a restaurant will receive an order for a dish it cannot prepare, eliminating the need to contact the customer and make changes to the order.

As a result, customers are less likely to be disappointed with the restaurant.

Kwaaka also automatically fills in product descriptions. According to the project’s founders, product descriptions can account for up to 40% of sales in the restaurant business.

From a technical perspective, Maksat, the project’s CTO, describes Kwaaka as a kind of “invisible hero.” The integration is seamless: there is no need to retrain employees or purchase additional hardware. Restaurant staff continue working with the POS system they already know, but orders from delivery aggregators now appear there automatically.

“Previously, a cashier could spend up to five hours a day transferring orders from an aggregator’s tablet into the restaurant’s POS system. With us, they have time to focus on more creative and less monotonous work. The error rate in order processing falls to 0.1–0.2%.

Of course, you cannot completely eliminate human error, and the quality of the internet connection is also extremely important. But we noticed that after Kwaaka is implemented, the quality of offline service in restaurants improves because employees have more time to listen carefully to guests’ requests and think about ways to increase customer loyalty,” says Maksat.

Kwaaka’s first clients were the FARSH and Rumi restaurant chains.

“We looked for our first clients using the same principle startups use when looking for their first investments — friends, family, fools. We are very grateful to the delivery director of FARSH for allowing us to test our solution at the Abu-Dhabi Plaza location.

Then we began working with Rumi, where we launched at three locations and realized that the problems our startup was designed to solve were, to some extent, common to all restaurants,” Nabi recalls.

Negotiations with international delivery aggregators were conducted at the headquarters level — in Barcelona, Helsinki, and Moscow, respectively. Today, Kwaaka works with Glovo, Wolt, and Yandex Eats in Kazakhstan.

The negotiation process took time. By entrusting an integrator with the processing of a large volume of orders, an aggregator takes on a certain degree of risk, so it needs to be confident that the IT solution is reliable.

“If aggregators developed solutions like ours themselves, they would have to maintain large teams of developers in every country where they operate. That is not cheap. Integrators can also handle the task more effectively.

We conducted numerous tests and eventually agreed that each side should focus on what it does best: aggregators deliver food, while we make sure orders are processed quickly, accurately, and without cancellations,” Nabi explains.

One of Kwaaka’s Kazakhstani partners is EMENU, a delivery aggregator from Karaganda.

For regional players like EMENU, minimizing order-processing errors and saving time are critical when competing with large international aggregators. That is why they are generally open to cooperation.

The major advantage of local aggregators is their flexibility and willingness to work together with Kwaaka to identify areas for mutual growth.

“We have had attempts to build partnerships with aggregators that were not particularly interested in integration, and most of those attempts went nowhere. If both sides are genuinely interested in the partnership, anything is possible. There are many problems, and you need patience to solve them,” Maksat comments.

Made in Kazakhstan

The service operates under a SaaS model. Integrating one location costs 25,000 tenge per month and takes approximately one week on average.

“Many similar solutions leave the integration process to the restaurant itself. As a result, the process becomes expensive and time-consuming. Restaurant owners are busy people: a manager has to deal with accounting, marketing, and many other issues.

We offer a simple solution that is easy to connect and use, while remaining affordable,” Nabi explains.

The founders of Kwaaka see their mission as giving restaurant owners a complete picture of how their businesses operate. The product will soon be expanded with analytics tools designed to help restaurants make better decisions.

Most restaurants, with the exception of large chains, cannot afford to hire analytics or data science specialists. However, the need for such solutions exists, and Kwaaka aims to address it.

According to Maksat, the company also plans to expand into other sectors of q-commerce. Kwaaka’s current clients include Small supermarkets, Nauryz-market, and the Sadykhan pharmacy chain.

Initially, the founders invested a relatively small amount of their own money into the project. Remembering his previous startup experience, Nabi decided not to seek outside investment until the company had achieved stable sales.

Once it became clear that the solution was in demand, the team approached potential investors.

“The strategy worked. We attracted our first investors literally within a week because we had a clear understanding of how we would sell and scale the product,” Nabi says.

At the first stage, the project raised $50,000. This was followed by a $235,000 round, during which the team attracted investment from venture fund Big Sky Capital, Murat Abdrakhmanov, Arman Shokparov, and MOST Ventures.

In July of the previous year, the startup closed a $600,000 funding round. Its investors included Murat Abdrakhmanov, Big Sky Capital, Madiyar Tuleuov, Olzhas Akbayev, and Aman Alimbayev.

The funds were intended to strengthen the company’s position in the Central Asian and Caucasus markets and launch its first restaurants in the Middle East.

The founders never intended to limit Kwaaka to the Kazakhstani market.

Less than six months after Kwaaka launched, Nabi traveled to Azerbaijan. His choice was based on a simple calculation: a flight from Almaty to Baku was cheaper than to other cities, while two major aggregators were already operating in the country and the startup needed new partners.

Ultimately, the company was unable to establish itself in Azerbaijan. The first countries on Kwaaka’s international map were Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, followed later by Uzbekistan, where the Kazakhstani startup works with major local player Express24.

At the beginning of the previous year, the founders set a goal of making Kwaaka the leading integrator in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

“The Uzbek market is very attractive to us. This year, we plan to open an office in Tashkent and launch one of the most interesting integrations together with Express24.

Another promising market is Georgia, where two major regional integrators are already operating. Trying our strength in a competitive market with large regional players is a challenge for Kwaaka. We also plan to open an office in Tbilisi.

We are studying the Middle Eastern markets — the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The UAE, for example, is an extremely competitive market with five major players, including two unicorns with enormous budgets. Entering such a market and competing there is a major challenge for us,” Nabi says.

According to him, Kwaaka has already managed to push one of its competitors out of the domestic market, primarily thanks to the quality of its solution and customer support.

Today, the project employs just over 40 people. The Almaty office is responsible for customer support, onboarding, sales, and marketing, while developers, designers, and the product team are based in the capital.

From a development perspective, Maksat emphasizes, Kwaaka is a 100% Kazakhstani product — something its founders are particularly proud of.

“We want our people to grow together with Kwaaka. Without that, there is no point in building a company. We are currently hiring teams to work in Uzbekistan and Georgia, and we do not rule out having citizens of those countries on those teams who understand the local language and mentality.

However, top management and development will remain in the hands of Kazakhstani specialists,” Maksat says.

Kwaaka’s goal for 2024 was to connect 2,500–3,500 users. The growth dynamics at the beginning of the year suggested that this target was achievable, while the maximum goal was 5,000 users.

In terms of geography, the company planned to add another two or three markets, primarily in the CIS and potentially in the MENA region — the Middle East and North Africa. In the longer term, the team also planned to enter one of the Eastern European markets.

“Kwaaka is currently the largest integrator in our region. We will actively increase our market penetration. Once we have built a large customer base in Central Asia and the Caucasus, we will begin entering more competitive markets,” Nabi and Maksat say of the future of their company.