The stark reality of today’s retail market is that most are currently grappling with soaring commercial rents, escalating labour shortages, and skyrocketing customer acquisition costs. Traditional offline-led businesses are finding that legacy growth playbooks no longer scale. While the rapid adoption of third-party consumer platforms initially offered an easy fix for digital visibility, this highly fragmented front-end strategy has fast hit a wall of diminishing returns. Retailers are increasingly trapped in low-margin loops, completely insulated from their own consumer data, and facing a systemic loss of direct customer ownership.
There might be some relief available, but it requires a shift from traditional retail practices to something a bit more “modern”. Take Cata, for instance, which positions itself as a next-generation B2B retail technology platform that helps merchants reclaim sovereignty over their digital ecosystems. Having recently secured a seed funding round, the startup is aggressively moving to expand its technical and commercial footprint across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, while building on a successful market entry into Europe.
We explore whether the Southeast Asian tech job rebound is real, but what does that mean for the region
Instead of forcing brands to stitch together disparate, unlinked tools, Cata has doubled down on building a robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure that democratises advanced retail tech, transitioning businesses away from operational complexity and into direct-to-consumer efficiency.
We sit down with David Brunier, CEO of Cata, to discuss the hidden liabilities of unlinked backend systems, the strategic pivot from multi-channel expansion to first-party channel consolidation, and why a unified tech stack is the ultimate paradigm shift for the future of commerce in Southeast Asia.
How are you planning to use the recent seed round to accelerate Southeast Asia’s shift toward advanced retail tech?
We plan to use the seed round to deepen the product and help more modern retail brands consolidate their consumer-facing digital tools into systems they can control.
Many merchants know they need stronger digital channels, but they have not built them yet because it’s costly, complex and fragmented. For offline-led businesses, that challenge has become harder as rent, labour costs and customer acquisition costs continue to rise. A branded app can help, but most brands do not have the time, team or budget to build and manage one from scratch.
That is the gap Cata is solving, by providing brands with a one-stop platform to launch and manage their own app, covering online ordering, loyalty, payments, CRM, marketing tools and first-party data in one place. This allows them to build a direct customer relationship without taking on the high cost and operational burden of building the technology themselves.
With this funding, we will continue to expand our product suite with significant focus on AI capabilities that help merchants better understand customer behaviour, improve repeat sales and make stronger decisions across their own channels. We are also growing both our technical and commercial teams to support more F&B and retail brands across Southeast Asia, while building on our successful launch in Europe as we expand into more developed markets. Our aim is to help more merchants practically use digital tools: to drive customer acquisition, repeat sales, and basket sizes, and to understand their customers better, all through channels they own and are able to control.
What about your experience at Flash Coffee convinced you that a unified digital backbone was a universal B2B necessity for retailers?
At Flash Coffee, we set out to build a fully tech-enabled F&B business from day one. The insight was simple: consumers across every category now expect to do things on their phones — ordering, paying, earning rewards, and discovering brands. But F&B and large parts of retail were still well behind, both in the experience offered to end consumers and in the digital tools available to merchants.
We started by looking for a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution ourselves, fairly naively assuming it would be easy to find. It wasn’t. There was no platform with proper native apps that could run the kind of growth strategies we knew were needed to take a business to the next level: proactively acquiring customers, increasing repeat frequency, lifting basket sizes, and building real first-party data the brand actually owns. So we built it in-house, out of necessity.
The moment we rolled it out, the growth profile of the business changed. We were no longer operating like a traditional F&B chain; we were operating much closer to an e-commerce business with physical stores. We could acquire customers proactively, retain them for longer, drive frequency and basket size automatically without retraining staff, and unlock meaningful staffing efficiencies at the same time.
That’s when the bigger pattern became clear. Major chains, regional and global, started reaching out, asking if they could have the same technology. They knew they needed it but couldn’t build it themselves, usually for a combination of reasons. They were excellent in their core domain, whether that was baking pizza or roasting coffee, but technology sat too far from that skill set. The budget required to build a strong digital product is significant. Hiring the right engineering and product talent is hard. Most of the time, it was all three at once.
That convinced my co-founders Marija, Sebastian and me that this isn’t a Flash Coffee problem, it’s an industry problem. F&B and modern retail brands want stronger direct customer channels: their own app, their own checkout, their own loyalty, their own customer data. But the cost, complexity and operational burden of stitching together orders, payments, loyalty, CRM and analytics into something the team can actually act on has been too high. Cata exists to close that gap: to give brands a practical way to launch and run their own app, keep their first-party data, and operate digitally without having to become a tech company first.
How exactly do unlinked backend systems cause brands to lose customer ownership, and how do you translate raw data into repeat growth?
Most brands lack (full) visibility of the customer, their behaviour, and preferences by nature, as they are historically operating offline. But even for somewhat tech-enabled brands, the challenge starts with the fact that most of them don’t own their customers due to a lack of a sophisticated setup in the first place.
A customer might order through one system, earn loyalty points in another, pay at the counter, and receive promotions elsewhere (e.g. through offline marketing material). More often than not, merchants have yet to roll out some of these solutions (e.g. there is no loyalty setup rolled out yet and potentially no strong consumer-facing channel to connect the loyalty program with actual orders). Each tool captures a piece of the journey, but the brand still cannot see the customer across its relevant ordering channels or act on that activity automatically. That weakens ownership because the customer relationship ends up spread across too many systems. In addition, that raw data does not create growth on its own, and merchants need a way to understand what to do with it, which could also be time-consuming and often lies outside of the team’s core competency.
Cata connects ordering, payments, loyalty, CRM, marketing and analytics in one system, so merchants can turn customer activity into action. They can see who buys often, who has stopped coming back, what products drive repeat orders, and which offers work.
From there, brands can create more tailored recommendations and promotions based on real customer behaviour. More importantly, they keep that first-party data themselves, instead of losing it to aggregators or scattered tools. This gives them a stronger base to drive repeat sales, improve loyalty, and build direct customer relationships through Cata’s growth engine.
Why has the front-end “multi-channel” strategy of simply adding more consumer platforms reached a point of diminishing returns for retailers?
Adding more consumer platforms used to be a practical way for retailers to reach more customers, but it has become harder to justify when each new channel adds more work without giving the brand more control.
For many retailers, every new platform means another place to manage. If the systems behind those channels do not connect, the team ends up spending more time managing tools than understanding what customers actually want.
The bigger issue is that more channels do not always mean stronger customer relationships. A retailer may get sales from third-party platforms, but the customer data often stays outside the business. That makes it harder or often impossible to know who is buying, what brings them back, and how to build repeat sales because the brand doesn’t control the channel.
This is why retailers are starting to look beyond adding more front-end channels and instead consolidate those channels while rolling out so-called first-party channels (branded channels they control, like their own apps and digital interfaces) to finally own their customer data, and use it to drive their growth and make more informed business decisions.
With over 80% of users abandoning branded apps on day one, how does Cata design its loyalty frameworks to build immediate consumer habits?
High app abandonment usually happens when customers download an app, use it once, and do not see a strong reason to come back. This happens with apps which do not meet customers’ ever-rising expectations of what a product should look, feel and function like.
Cata was built by operators for operators, and that shapes how we approach the partnership; loyalty included. We don’t drop a generic framework on a merchant and hope it works. We build the right setup together with them, drawing on extensive industry experience to guide them through what actually drives repeat behaviour in their category.
The way we design a loyalty framework starts with understanding the nature of the business: what customers value most, and how the merchant can offer meaningful benefits without stretching margins too thinly. We then pair those insights, which deepen over time through the data we import and collect once Cata channels go live, with the features in our growth engine, from loyalty tiers and points systems to digital stamp cards, refer-a-friend, and more. The output is a tailored loyalty approach built for that specific merchant and its customers, rather than a template.
On top of that, we extend loyalty across order channels. With Cata’s omni-channel loyalty system, a customer can order at the counter through the POS, scan the loyalty QR code in their wallet, and still collect rewards for that purchase. That seamless connection lets the merchant collect cross-channel customer data, identifying the same customer across multiple sales channels, and then automate marketing strategies and budgets based on a holistic view of behaviour, not a fragmented one.
We see ourselves as partners for growth, not just a software provider. The first few interactions a customer has with a brand’s app are what decide whether it becomes a repeat channel or a one-time download. Getting that right takes more than points and rewards; it takes the operator’s instinct for what customers actually want, paired with the tools to deliver it consistently across every channel the brand runs.
What’s next for Cata in the region?
Cata started with F&B because the need is clear there, but the same problem exists across modern retail and consumer commerce. Many brands want stronger direct customer relationships, but they still lack the tools to build and manage those channels well.
We are also building towards broader retail use cases beyond F&B, while doubling down on the markets where we are already present. The goal is to give more consumer-facing brands access to the kind of digital capability that large enterprises have, without forcing them to build the full system from scratch, as we continue to grow across APAC and selected developed markets beyond the region.