Baidu leads $100m round for China’s laundry app Edaixi
Baidu has led a $100 million Series B round of funding for Edaixi, an mobile-based on-demand laundry service.
Existing investors Matrix Partners China and SIG also participated, the company confirmed to 36kr.
Edaixi, which is owned by Beijing-based laundry franchise Rongchain, launched in 2013. Customers can summit their orders either through the company's mobile app or Tencent's mobile instant-messaging app WeChat. Staff collect the laundry and return it clean within 72 hours. The company offers a flat-rate RMB99 per bag service. It can also clean items such as shoes, curtains and luxury goods on an individual basis.
The start-up receives more than 100,000 orders per day across 16 Chinese cities. It claims to have five million users, or an over 90% market share. There are plans to expand the service to 100 cities.
Last November, Matrix and SIG committed $20 million in a Series A round of funding. Prior to that, the company received RMB20 million in seed funding from Tencent.
Wenyong Lu, Edaixi's CEO, said that Baidu is looking at online-to-offline (O2O) community service to complement its online search capabilities. He expects Baidu's location-based services technology to improve Edaixi's logistics operation.
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