Malaysian food delivery start-up dahmakan enters Bangkok through acquisition

Malaysian food delivery start-up dahmakan has expanded into Bangkok, Thailand with the acquisition of Thai food delivery service Polpa. This move sees co-founders of Polpa, Julian Timings and Prongfa Uennatornaranggoon, join dahmakan in executive roles.While dahmakan's spokesperson declined to reveal the monetary value and share of the acquisition, the spokesperson said that Timings will take on the role of head of automation and machine learning, as part of the dahmakan engineering team, while Prongfa will become the head of food product.The spokesperson added that Polpa will be hiring for its senior management roles in marketing, operations and finance. There will be no conflicting clients as dahmakan previously operated in Kuala Lumpur and Polpa in Bangkok.Following the acquisition, Polpa will utilise dahmakan's fully automated AI-powered logistics platform that dahmakan has built, that leverages 24 different AI components when making routing decisions based on real-time data. The data is collected by dahmakan's network of more than 120 delivery riders and enhanced with customer, weather and traffic information.Like dahmakan, Polpa will be focusing on content marketing, social media and offline marketing through partnerships to grow its consumer base in Bangkok.According to Jonathan Weins, co-founder and CEO of dahmakan, the company chose to acquire Polpa as it has done a "fantastic job" at building a strong brand and a great customer experience. "We are huge fans of the product and could not be more thrilled to bring onboard these incredibly smart founders to take dahmakan to the next level," Weins added.Timings added that he and Prongfa are excited about joining dahmakan as they both share the same vision for the future of food delivery.Dahmakan intends to expand to all major cities across Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong before the end of 2019. Since its launch in 2015, the company has raised more than US$4 million in venture capital funding. Investors include Atami Capital, Texas Atlantic Capital and Asia Venture Group.