What Could Possibly Be Common to yufin and Uber?

Shubhrendu Khoche • February 28, 2026

A screenshot of the photo-to-basket feature.

What could possibly be common to yufin and Uber?

They announced last week what yufin recently launched earlier this month for small business owners in the Philippines.

The same technology that takes a photo of your handwritten shopping list or recipe book to place an order on Uber Eats with one click, is being used by small merchants in the Philippines to place weekly orders to wholesalers for their supplies, in three minutes instead of thirty.

So they can get back to serving customers faster & make more money, everyday.

The AI impact summit this week in India is focusing on economic growth and social good. These set of technologies are part of how yufin is doing well by doing good at the last mile in the Global South solving for real problems faced everyday by people responsible for majority of consumption, money flows and having the latent power to amplify national economic growth.

Here is what we learnt along the way last three months trying out this “photo to basket” for small merchants in South Philippines:

1. Habits beat novelty
A big chunk of small business owners who are used to scribbling their list of items to order did not skip this step when they shifted to using the yufin app, to use our B2B commerce platform. So we had to simplify, not eliminate this step. They were doing their estimations, preference comparisons, mental budget reallocations all at this step. Naturally, they were scratching out, editing, and inserting items and quantities at multiple places in their shopping lists.

2. Explain it
The merchants were not interested in the technology at all. “You can place your order in three minutes instead of thirty” was all they wanted to hear.

3. Do not fight the flow, but surf it
We observed that merchants were either taking photos of their shopping lists and messaging our telesales, or dictating it to our field sales. Either way, it was taking longer than required to encode merchant orders and to place their long orders to the wholesalers. Now, the same technology is also available to our field sales ambassadors on the ground and to remote yufin telesales placing “on behalf of” orders.

4. Give me more
Many yufin merchants want to top-up with trending and more profitable items, so we add-on from the best-selling items list for those who want to get recommendations to grow their business.

It comes down to what you do with technology. The same AI/ML technology making consumers smile in California, Paris and Dubai is making small business owners admire in awe in Cabantian, Poblacion and Digos.

Saving them time and making them more money. Every week.

yufin is at 80% – 90% accuracy level for the wholesalers’ catalog of five thousand items in yuOrder & is improving with each handwritten receipt that it sees.