CMB, Tiantu lead $300m Series D for China's Guoquan

It comes eight months after a $60 million Series C round led by GenBridge Capital.

While HaiDiLao is China’s leading hotpot restaurant chain, Guoquan aims to become the dominant force in the “hotpot at home” market. It claims to offer high-quality food at one-third of the price of a restaurant.

Founded in 2017, the company initially provided hot pot ingredients to small and medium-sized restaurants. It then moved into the consumer market and started selling directly to households. It provides more than 400 kinds of self-developed hot pot ingredients, mostly frozen products. Finished and half-finished dishes are available as well.

Consumer-end sales data are used to guide hundreds of upstream factories, with a view to improving product quality and supply chain efficiency. Guoquan's first directly-operated fresh produce factory recently went into operation.

The company has introduced a 5,000-store offline network - up from 4,000 at the time of the Series C - to complement its online platform. It opened 12 stores a day during the first nine months of 2020, serving 130 million users. The next step, according to a statement released last year, is to have 10,000 stores by 2022.

Meanwhile, Guoquan has entered the barbecue segment, developing more than 100 ingredients and launching a smokeless family barbecue grill.

The company claims to have been profitable for the last two years, with revenue growing fivefold in 2019. 

It received RMB45 million ($6.4 million) in funding from Buhuo Ventures in August 2019, followed by a RMB50 million Series A extension from Shenzhen-listed Sanquan Food three months later. IDG Capital led a $50 million Series B round in early 2020.

Although hot pot is a niche market, plenty of start-ups offer fresh produce supply services more generally. Shihuituan, a community group buying platform also known as Nice Tuan, raised $196 million in the third tranche of a Series C last December. Before that, online grocer Miss Fresh secured $495 million in what was described as the largest private round ever seen in the fresh produce segment.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Consumer
• China
• Tiantu Capital
• Growth capital