“The higher we went, the hotter we got”
It’s been a long road Why Q.
In 2016, the company was built around a specific idea: to make grocery shopping more accessible to busy office workers in the CBD. After years of pivots, the deviation of the epidemic period in the delivery of residences, and the hard lessons that come with it, the Singapore startup seems to have found a working model – a B2B business restaurant.
And the numbers are starting to show.
WhyQ co-founders Varun Saraf and Rishabh Singhvi shared that the company achieved core profitability in Singapore by Q2 2025 and stayed there. They added that the business has maintained an average annual revenue of approximately S$5 million by Q1 2026.
For a company that has been burning cash during the epidemic of the consumer delivery segment—sending individual passengers for meals costing S$10 to S$15 without economies of scale—that’s a sensible change.
“When we went up, we got really fired up,” COO Singhvi said in a previous interview Technology in Asia. The pivot to B2B, he shared, “solved our entire unit economics puzzle.”
Delivering more than 2,500 business meals daily
WhyQ now operates exclusively as a B2B platform. Gone is the consumer app that once worked with more than 2,200 retail locations in 35 retail centers.
In its place is a soft corporate restaurant operation: just over a quarter of the number of partners out of 500 merchant partners, but with long-term contracts that provide the business with predictable, recurring revenue.
Great lesson [we] The study was trying to compete in a volatile consumer delivery market, where revenues lack long-term predictability.
About 20% of orders still come from our hawker partners, while the remaining 80% are handled by selected restaurant companies. Meal prices range from S$8 to S$25 per head.
The company also moved away from third party gig logistics that caused many headaches for consumers. WhyQ now has its own dedicated delivery vessel, whose passengers are trained to check the quality of the kitchen and manage the food preparation directly at the clients’ offices.
“HR doesn’t have to lift a finger,” Saraf said.
Today, WhyQ delivers more than 2,500 meals daily to corporate customers.
What makes it even more attractive to corporate customers is that WhyQ white-labels its ordering portals to look like an internal customer platform. It also hosts everything from daily lunch to snacks, event catering, and live food stations.
The company claims 100% customer retention among its corporate accounts.
Our merchant partners also benefit from predictability. Gyoza San founder Wilman Ng said the company’s ordering system has consistently increased monthly revenue by 15 to 20%. KinBaba Thai has reported a 15% revenue increase since joining the WhyQ network.
WhyQ’s next big bet
Assuming the B2B foundation holds, WhyQ’s next step is WhyQ Intelligence, an AI-powered nutrition and health tool that is still in testing, with a commercial launch targeted for Q3 2026.
The idea is to allow employees to track healthy food macros, set meal goals, and chat with an AI assistant for menu recommendations—all related to their company’s curated meal options. For HR teams, it connects meal participation data with attendance trends and employee engagement metrics.
Saraf positions itself as both a client retention play and a new data layer: understanding what exactly employees want to eat, which keeps menus fresh and deepens WhyQ’s hold on the accounts it already has.
The company is looking at an engagement rate of 70 to 80% among employees at client companies in the first year of the tool.
Down the line, WhyQ Intelligence may be sold as a stand-alone product sold to companies that manage their food systems. That’s a long runway, but it shows that the founders are thinking beyond functionality.
“We have a long way to go here”
WhyQ is focused on annual revenue growth of 50%, driven primarily by growth within existing accounts. One corporate client is reported to be 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 corporate clients with offices in both cities. Rather than grow speculatively, WhyQ says it will enter a new market only after securing a profitable anchor contract.
It also plans to find local dealer networks where possible instead of building jobs from scratch.
That said, expanding abroad is not a new place to start.
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 gone out of business.
We chose to exit that market because we feel that we are still scratching the surface of the Singapore market and we still have a long way to go here.
That opportunity is always important.
Over the next three to five years, the founders plan to deepen their reach into industrial and commercial deserts like Tuas and Jurong, areas where workers have historically had limited access to quality, convenient food options.
Years of pivots, pandemics, and painful lessons have transformed WhyQ into a business focused less on growth than on growth and sustainable economics.
Whether that formula still holds remains to be seen. But for now, the startup seems to have found something it spent nearly a decade searching for: a business model that actually works.
- Read other articles we’ve written about Singapore businesses here.
Also read: This 52 Y/O coffee business roasts 1,000kg of coffee every month and wins young drinkers
Featured Image Credit: WhyQ
