VMPL
New Delhi [India], September 11: Startups are often celebrated for doing things differently. They enter established industries, challenge old business models and proudly make mistakes that teach them what incumbents already know.
Wera Foods is taking a slightly different approach.
As the restaurant technology company prepares to expand its direct presence in the POS and billing market, it is deliberately bringing in people who have already spent years understanding how the industry works.
The reasoning is simple: some lessons are better learned from experience than from expensive experimentation.
Wera Foods, founded in 2015 by hospitality professional Kailash Chavan, knows a thing or two about changing direction. The company initially experimented with an aggregator model before moving into technology services and eventually building a business around middleware and API integrations between POS systems and food aggregation platforms.
That business gave Wera something valuable: a view of the restaurant industry from the technology layer rather than from the restaurant counter.
But the company now wants to go closer to the counter itself.
Wera has been developing its own POS capabilities since 2017 and is preparing to take its billing and ERP products directly to restaurants. The immediate focus is the restaurant segment, with retail being considered as a later opportunity.
The difficult part isn't necessarily writing software.
It is understanding what makes a restaurant buy it.
That is why Wera has been recruiting experienced talent from the POS industry. Mr.Kailash Chavan's strategy is unusually candid: when entering a competitive market, a company can spend years trying different approaches, making mistakes and eventually figuring out what works. Wera would rather bring in people who have already acquired that knowledge.
Mr. Kailash Chavan described the approach as essentially “buying experience” to save time and reduce the cost of experimentation.
There is a larger lesson in that decision.
Wera's earlier business was built around partnerships. Rather than competing directly for restaurants, the company worked with POS partners and provided the technology that allowed different platforms to communicate. That kept Wera largely out of the public eye while giving it a deep understanding of the systems running behind restaurant operations.
Meanwhile, companies that went directly to restaurants built stronger consumer and industry recognition. Mr.Kailash Chavan points to POS Petpooja’s role in educating the market around restaurant automation as an example of how visibility and market education can become advantages of their own.
Now Wera wants to apply what it learned from the other side.
The company's strategy is not to throw away its earlier experience but to build on it. Its middleware capabilities remain an important part of the business, while its newer push into direct POS and ERP software gives it an opportunity to establish its own relationship with restaurants.
That shift has also been supported by developments outside the product itself. In 2023, Wera received investment from a Singapore-based company that had been looking for integration capabilities in India while exploring technology services for large international brands.
For M. Kailash Chavan, the move is also a departure from his own professional style.
With more than two decades of experience in hospitality, he has traditionally been more comfortable building businesses than talking about them. During the discussion, he described how Wera had remained “behind the scene” for much of its existence.
That is changing now.
The company is looking at a more visible role in the industry, while Mr. Kailash Chavan is considering podcasts and debate-led formats where he can participate in wider conversations around hospitality and technology.
The timing may be right.
Restaurant technology is no longer an obscure back-office function. Billing, online ordering, integrations, customer data and operational software increasingly determine how efficiently a restaurant can function.
The interesting question for Wera is whether its years of experience underneath the industry can translate into an advantage when it finally comes face-to-face with the restaurant itself.
The company spent its first phase building quietly.
Its second phase may be about proving that knowing the machinery behind the industry is just as valuable as knowing how to sell to the people running it.
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