Yunquna, Shanghai-based supermarket of international logistics, made a bundle this time. Investors are surprisingly optimistic.
Meet another China's logistics services platform to compete against Maersk, CMA CGM and the likes – Yunquna (运去哪). The company just raised USD 70 million in the Series C round of funding. This round was led jointly by Sequoia Capital China and Coatue Management, Source Code Capital (源码资本) also put some money in. Investarget (多维海拓) joined the party as a financial advisor.
Yunquna bridges business units involved in the international trade and those providing the latter with transportation channels (aka logistics services companies). The firm is a Walmart for trans-border trade as logistics price inquiry, cargo space booking, customs clearance, logistics tracking, cargo handling, insurance and other services might be found among its functions.
According to the company's official website, from the market perspective, the key value-adding feature of this platform is efficiency-seeking. Headquartered in Shanghai, Yunquna seeks for saving the clients' money by use of tools based on big data algorithms. Basically, it is a classic example of a SaaS company.
This round is a major boost in terms of financing: over the three previous rounds the firm raised less than USD 40 million. For the four years of operating, Yunquna has seemingly improved internally, polished and detalized its market strategy. "Unlike some emerging digital freight service providers abroad, we position ourselves as industry linkers providing access to offline logistics resources", said Zhou Shihao (周诗豪), founder and CEO of the firm.
US-China trade talks taking a sharp turn for the worse over the last several months. Although the trade war is in full swing, someone still has to move containers overseas. Apparently, China hasn't swerved from the course of export-led growth and recently has been developing so-called south-south direction, making bets on the economically promising regions like Africa and Southeastern Asia.
For now, global logistics scene is a decent bellwether for overall state of the markets. Cutting-out-the-middlemen trends and rise of platform models may change this rule shortly.