China’s JD.com leads $70m round for VC-backed Fruitday

The company claims this is the largest funding round in China's fresh produce e-commerce industry to date. Existing investors SIG Asia Investments and ClearVue Partners also participated.

Fruitday was founded by Guozhang Zhao and Wei Wang in 2009. The latter's father worked as a fruit wholesaler for 30 years and so he grew up with the industry and brought to the table a strong network of suppliers. Last year, it secured a $10 million round led by ClearVue.

Fruitday imports over 80% of the fruit from overseas, including the US, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and South Africa. It has built its own warehouses and logistics systems in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, in order to standardize services and keep down costs. The company claimed to be on course to hit 10 million users this year, a four-fold increase on 2014. Most of its orders placed from mobile devices.

The new capital will go towards infrastructure, recruitment, business development and strengthening Fruitday's upstream supply chain system. The company will also leverage JD's nationwide fulfilment infrastructure to expand its services.

JD.com operated seven fulfillment centers and a total of 143 warehouses in 43 cities, and more than 3,500 delivery and pick-up stations in about 2,000 counties and districts across China, staffed by its own employees.

"By combining JD.com's online e-commerce platform and nationwide logistics infrastructure with FruitDay's vertical leadership, more and more Chinese consumers nationwide will have the ability to purchase safe and healthy fresh produce online with confidence," said Haoyu Shen, JD Mall's CEO, in a statement.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Consumer
• Venture
• Technology
• Expansion
• China
• TMT
• Consumer
• Venture
• JD.com
• ClearVue Partners
• Susquehanna Asia Investment
• Growth capital
• Logistics