Chinese fresh food e-commerce platform Pupu Mall has raised a USD55 million series B1 round of financing.
Chinese fresh food e-commerce platform Pupu Mall has raised a USD55 million series B1 round of financing, according to a statement released on Wednesday.
Pupu Mall is a retail technology company that focuses on creating a mobile 30-minute instant delivery one-stop shopping platform. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Fuzhou in China. The company applies a "front warehouse plus online operation" retail model. Instead of opening brick-and-mortar stores, Pupu Malls operates small independent warehouses around residential communities to conduct commodity turnover, short-term storage, sorting, and distribution.
Pupu Mall has raised a total of USD56.5M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 27, 2019 from a Series B round backed by Thai Joint Venture.
The products are delivered to buyers at their house within 30 minutes after the order is placed via Pupu App or Wechat mini program. Pupu Mall covers all kinds of fresh products such as vegetables, meat, milk, seafood, snacks, fruits and other daily necessities.
Founded and based in Fuzhou, this company raised CNY10 million in its pre A round of financing. With a great amount of money pouring into the fresh food e-commerce industry of China, we can say that the market is growing with a relatively fast speed. Last November, Legend Capital and an investment unit of Alibaba Group led a CNY100 million (USD15 million) series A round in seafood business to business (B2B) e-commerce start-up Gfresh.
Few market sectors offer the potential that China or e-commerce do.
The Chinese economy has been a huge source of growth for companies around the world over the past several decades. China's gross domestic product has regularly grown by 7% or more during that time. As of early 2019, it was the world's No. 2 economy behind the U.S., and its set to move into the top spot by 2030, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
According to The Molty, in the U.S., e-commerce sales topped USD500 billion last year, and the sector has consistently grown by about 15% annually since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, now making up nearly 10% of total retail sales. In China, e-commerce is growing even faster, with sales rising 25% to USD1.05 trillion last year. The category now makes up 18% of total retail sales in the country, up from 11% in 2015.
An exploding middle class has created a new consumer culture in China in barely a generation. That, along with infrastructure investments that have made shipping easier, and the Chinese embrace of technology including smartphones, has led to the country's sudden growth of e-commerce.
It is clear that China is still the fastest-growing large economy in the world, and e-commerce is quickly gaining share on the overall retail market, making it a top-notch opportunity for growth investors. E-commerce in China is growing faster than it is in the U.S. and makes up a larger percentage of retail sales in China than it does in the U.S. Both of those facts bode well for the sector's continuing growth.