Miss Fresh delivers big in new round of fundraising

Chinese online fresh food startup Miss Fresh announced on Thursday it has raised $495 million in its latest round of fundraising, which it claimed to be the largest financing round in the country's online fresh food sector.

Led by CICC Capital, the fundraising also attracted ICBC International, Tencent Holdings Ltd, Abu Dhabi Capital Group, the Suzhou Changshu government industry fund, Tiger Global and a fund from Goldman Sachs.

"In the next five years, the online fresh supermarket industry will enter a stage of rapid growth. User coverage will spread from early adopters to the mainstream," said Xu Zheng, founder and CEO of Miss Fresh.

"Online fresh supermarkets will become mainstream purchase channels. For companies, those with sound upstream supply chains and digital chains will become the ultimate winners," Xu said.

Miss Fresh, founded in 2015, is an online fresh food startup with pre-storage delivery. It has offered its fresh food services to some ten million families across 16 cities nationwide. The company said its business scale exceeded 10 billion yuan, and has maintained a healthy profitable growth.

The fresh round of financing, according to Wang Jun, chief financial officer of Miss Fresh, will be used in the company's smart chain technology and production supply chain capabilities to further boost development of its business model.

Xiao Feng, president of CICC Capital, said: "Fresh Food is a trillion-yuan scale market and also a high-frequency portal for online community retail. Miss Fresh has achieved positive operating cash flow nationwide for six consecutive months."

"More importantly, we are optimistic about its core capabilities based on digital chain and heavy warehouse supply chains. This is not only the underlying driving factor for sustained and healthy growth, but also the core competitive barrier in the future," Xiao said.