China's B2B trading platform Ichunt raises $100m
Ichunt.com, a Chinese B2B trading platform for electronic components, has raised nearly $100 million in Series C funding from JD MRO, the industrial supplies business of local e-commerce giant JD.com.
The fresh capital will be used for business integration with JD MRO, which has ambitions to become a one-stop e-commerce platform for the industrial maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) space. They will jointly build cloud-based infrastructure for industrial supply chains, providing a long life cycle service to customers.
Founded in 2015, Ichunt targets small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It claims to have connections with more than 5,000 suppliers and has access to over 60 million stock-keeping units (SKUs).
The company addresses a classic SME pain point in manufacturing: often their orders are too small to be accepted by large suppliers. Ichunt's solution is to aggregate demand and procure directly from global component makers and global and domestic dealers. It has also developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to predict orders.
“With the acceleration of the iterative speed of intelligent home appliances and the diversification of demand, existing supply chain systems are obviously unable to meet requirements in terms of agility, flexibility, and high efficiency on the purchasing side. The consensus view is that supply chains must undergo digital and intelligent transformation," said Jiang Chang, Ichunt's chairman.
China is the world's largest consumer of electronic components, accounting for more than 50% of the total global purchases. An e-commerce model is much faster and cheaper than the traditional distribution channels, Chang added.
Ichunt received RMB10 million ($1.5 million) in angel funding from Matrix Partners China in 2015, followed by a $5 million round in 2016 backed by Matrix and Welight Venture. JD Group led a Series B round in 2018. Haitong Capital Investment and Haiton Innovation Capital then led a RMB160 million Series B extension later the same year, AVCJ Research's records show.
JD MRO has also received private funding. Last year, GGV Capital led a $230 million Series A round for the company.
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