Internet group Tencent took part in a $230m series C+ round for China-based grocery e-commerce platform MissFresh, as reported last week.
Hedge fund manager Tiger Global Management and investment firm Genesis Capital co-led the round, which followed a $100m series C in January this year.
The January round was co-led by Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, the corporate venturing arm of electronic producer Lenovo, and Zhejiang Zheshang Venture Capital, and included Tencent, KTB Investment & Securities, Grand Flight Investment and China Growth Capital.
Founded in 2014, MissFresh runs an online e-commerce platform that sells fresh produce such as fruit, vegetables, seafood and eggs, and delivers them to customers within two hours, making use of a cold chain logistics network it has established throughout China. The company’s service had 1 million monthly active users as of February this year, according to China Money Network.
The newly raised funding will help expand a recently launched MissFresh service that involves the installation of vending machine-like snack bars in office buildings.
MissFresh is part of the food and beverage space within the consumer sector. The interest of corporate venturers in this area has been growing significantly over the past three years, as illustrated on the historical bar chart by GCV Analytics: from merely 17 deals in 2013 with an estimated total of $109m to 57 rounds with total estimated investment value of $4.62bn in 2016.
