“The more we scaled, the more we burned”
It’s been a long road for WhyQ.
In 2016, the company was built around a straightforward idea: make hawker food more accessible to busy office workers in the CBD. After years of pivots, a pandemic-era detour into residential deliveries, and the hard lessons that came with it, the Singapore startup has appeared to have found a model that works—B2B corporate dining.
And the numbers are starting to show it.
WhyQ co-founders Varun Saraf and Rishabh Singhvi shared that the company hit baseline profitability in Singapore in Q2 2025 and has stayed there. They added that the business has maintained an annualised revenue run rate of about S$5 million through Q1 2026.
For a company that was burning through cash during its pandemic-era consumer delivery phase—dispatching individual riders for meals worth S$10 to S$15 with no economies of scale—that’s a meaningful turnaround.
“The more we scaled, the more we burned,” COO Singhvi said in a previous interview with Tech in Asia. The pivot to B2B, he shared, “solved our entire unit economics puzzle.”
Delivering over 2,500 corporate meals daily
WhyQ now operates exclusively as a B2B platform. Gone is the sprawling consumer app that once partnered with over 2,200 hawker stalls across 35 hawker centres.
In its place is a leaner corporate dining operation: just slightly over one-fourth the number of partners at 500 merchant partners, but with long-term contracts that give the business predictable, recurring revenue.
The biggest lesson [we] learned was trying to compete in the volatile consumer delivery market, where revenue simply lacks long-term predictability.
About 20% of orders still come from hawker partners, with the remaining 80% driven by curated restaurant brands. Meal prices range from S$8 to S$25 per head.
The company has also moved away from the third-party gig logistics that caused so many of its consumer-era headaches. WhyQ now runs its own dedicated delivery fleet, whose riders are trained to conduct quality checks at the kitchen and handle meal setup directly at client offices.
“HR doesn’t have to lift a finger,” Saraf said.
Today, WhyQ delivers more than 2,500 meals daily to corporate clients.
What makes it even more appealing to corporate clients is that WhyQ white-labels its ordering portals so they look like the client’s own internal platform. It also handles everything from daily lunches to pantry snacks, event catering, and live food stations.
The company claims 100% client retention among its corporate accounts.
Merchant partners are also benefiting from the predictability. Gyoza San’s founder Wilman Ng said the corporate order program has consistently boosted their monthly revenue by 15 to 20%. KinBaba Thai reported a similar 15% revenue lift since joining WhyQ’s network.
WhyQ’s next big bet
Assuming the B2B foundation holds, WhyQ’s next move is WhyQ Intelligence, an AI-powered nutrition and wellness tool currently in pilot, with a commercial launch targeted for Q3 2026.
The idea is to let employees track nutritional macros, set dietary targets, and chat with an AI assistant for menu recommendations—all tied to their company’s curated meal options. For HR teams, it connects meal participation data with attendance trends and employee engagement metrics.
Saraf frames it as both a client retention play and a new data layer: understanding what employees actually want to eat, which keeps menus fresh and deepens WhyQ’s grip on the accounts it already has.
The company is targeting a 70 to 80% engagement rate among employees at client companies in the tool’s first year.
Down the line, WhyQ Intelligence could potentially be spun out as a standalone product sold to companies managing their own food programs. That’s a longer runway, but it signals the founders are thinking beyond logistics.
“We have a long way to go here”
WhyQ is targeting 50% year-on-year revenue growth, driven largely by expanding within existing accounts. One enterprise client is reportedly adding 120 daily meals in Jun 2026 and another 250 in Oct.
Beyond Singapore, the founders see Hong Kong and Sydney as their next potential markets, pointing to similar competition for talent and existing enterprise customers with offices in both cities. Rather than expanding speculatively, WhyQ says it will only enter a new market after securing a profitable anchor contract.
It also plans to acquire local merchant networks where possible instead of building operations from scratch.
That said, overseas expansion isn’t new territory for the startup.
WhyQ previously operated in Malaysia, where it offered two free digital tools: WhyQ EBiz, an app that helped merchants manage their businesses online, and WhyQ Kira Kira, a digital bookkeeping app. The company has since exited the market.
We chose to exit that market because we feel we are still just scratching the surface of the Singapore market and have a long way to go here.
That opportunity remains significant.
Over the next three to five years, the founders plan to deepen their reach into industrial and commercial food deserts like Tuas and Jurong, areas where workers have historically had limited access to quality, convenient food options.
Years of pivots, a pandemic, and painful lessons have reshaped WhyQ into a business focused less on growth for growth’s sake and more on sustainable economics.
Whether that formula holds remains to be seen. But for now, the startup appears to have found something it spent nearly a decade searching for: a business model that actually works.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
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Featured Image Credit: WhyQ
