A population of 200 million people, a restaurant base of thousands of restaurants, and a market where food is loved, cherished, enjoyed, celebrated, lived from morning till night, Pakistan is a land with a love and passion for food and yet there was no company which connected these millions of customers with thousands of restaurants across Pakistan. Something had to be built…

Foodconnection Pakistan was launched in Pakistan on July 7th, 2011 with a mission to connect the customers and restaurant on a single platform. Bootstrapped and launched out of Dad’s living room this platform accomplished a revenue turnover of hundred and fifty thousand dollars, two hundred thousand daily visitors to the platform and a team which grew from four people to now sixteen! However, despite food connection Pakistan fulfilling the goal of connecting restaurants and customers, since it was a review-based platform, it wasn’t able to capitalize by addressing this opportunity and struggled to operate as a company, something had to be done…

EatOye! was born around Oct, 2013 and was a pivot from food connection Pakistan review-based platform. It enabled customers to place an order directly on the platform rather than only review information about restaurants. Building upon food connection Pakistan restaurant Industry contacts EatOye! was able to scale its restaurant based very quickly and provided food ordering service to larger customer base. Albeit the whole order taking and transmission to restaurants was a manual process initially, the EatOye! team took special care and dedication to ensure that all orders reached customers in time. For this the founding team at EatOye! ensured to spend 6 hourly daily working alongside the contact center team. This not only gave clarity to the founding team on issues across the overall business, but also enabled them to build the warm bond with the customers. This warm and valuable connection with the customers along with diversified mix of restaurants enabled EatOye! to grow rapidly and become the most trusted and liked platform in the country. Along with winning customer love, EatOye! was winning awards and gained popularity and by July, 2014 was reached out by numerous foreign players for potential investment and acquisition, interesting names actually Naspers, Rocket Internet and European founders’ group. We must have made quite an Impact! along with continuing discussions with these players EatOye! marched onwards to cater to more customers in Pakistan. In Feb, 2015 EatOye! was acquired by foodpanda. EatOye! was the first and only Pakistani’s E-commerce exit to date. This acquisition was received by people with mixed emotions, it was well celebrated in startup circles and acted as a catalyst for more startups to launch in Pakistan and more investors to invest in Pakistan, but at the same time the customers in Pakistan felt that a true Pakistani born company serving Pakistani customers was not there anymore and they will not have access to the great service which they once had, something had to be done…