Conor McNamara (AWS)
The Thai maker of food delivery app Robinhood has tapped AWS to underpin its offering, designed to provide food vendors with a low-cost alternative to existing food delivery platform operators.
The Robinhood app was built in just three months and is claimed to be the first in Thailand that doesn’t levy application or gross profit fees on small food vendors, a sector that has been struggling financially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Robinhood service was developed by Purple Ventures Co., a subsidiary of SCB 10X – itself a holding company of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank (SCB Group).
As part of Siam Commercial Bank’s corporate social responsibility initiative, the company stepped in to help Thai street food stalls, which it said were often charged a fee of up to 30-35 per cent of each order, increase online deliveries and profits using the cloud.
“The restaurant industry continues to experience unprecedented difficulties,” Purple Ventures managing director Srihanath Lamsam said. “By developing Robinhood as a food delivery app that food stall owners can leverage, Purple Ventures is helping food stall vendors, which would normally rely on foot traffic, continue to sell during the pandemic, when customers are ordering meals online rather than walking to food stalls.
“By not levying application or gross profit fees, Purple Ventures is making it affordable for food stall vendors to list their meal options on the app.
“AWS enables us to cost-effectively scale our technology infrastructure as we grow, which supports our plans to onboard more delivery riders and restaurants in Bangkok and to expand to other cities to support even more small food vendors across the country,” he added.
Broadly, the app has leveraged AWS’ portfolio of cloud services, including containers, database, compute and machine learning to support restaurants, drivers and customers in Bangkok since its launch in October 2020.
The Robinhood app and underlying platform was built using the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which provides flexibility to start, run and scale Kubernetes container applications in the cloud.
In the development process, readily-available merchant, customer, rider and transaction services were integrated as the container building blocks of Robinhood, reducing app development time and cost.
The Robinhood service also uses Amazon Aurora MySQL, a relational database built for the cloud, to process up to 3,000 food orders per minute.
Additionally, using AWS Batch, Robinhood can run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs in the cloud, which is said to improve customer experience by quickly processing user requests.
Moreover, Robinhood uses Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for building, training and deploying machine learning models, to deliver personalised restaurant recommendations to over 926,000 customers.
According to Conor McNamara, AWS ASEAN managing director, by leveraging AWS’ portfolio of cloud services to develop new offerings, Purple Ventures is helping tens of thousands of food stalls grow their customer base through Robinhood.
“AWS is pleased to have helped Purple Ventures quickly create its Robinhood app, which uses cloud technology to expand opportunities for street food stalls in Thailand,” he said.
In July last year, CAT Telecom became another Thai organisation to leverage AWS, unveiling plans to capitalise on increased appetite for cloud adoption in the country, employing AWS Outposts to target enterprise and public sector customers.
Fresh from being appointed as an expert provider, the Bangkok-based business positioned the managed service offering at organisations seeking to keep data in-country, across key sectors such as healthcare, financial services and manufacturing.
“Outposts will benefit customers that are running workloads on-premises and looking for options to migrate to a cloud provider without compromising data sovereignty,” Dr Wongkot Vijacksungsithi, senior executive and vice president of Digital Business at CAT Telecom, said at the time. “By processing and storing data within country, Outposts will remove a major roadblock for our customers in adopting cloud technology."
AWS launched Outposts in Thailand and Malaysia in late June last year, building on Southeast Asia momentum to provide a fully managed service through specialist channel partners.
