A B2B platform selling vegetables founded by Yu Lingbing, the creator of Taobao’s rural e-commerce business, has received RMB 85 million (USD 13 million) in a Series A+ round.
The financing came from Yintai Holdings, Matrix Partners China and IDG China, tech blog 36 Kr reported on Tuesday.
Songxiaocai, or “delivering vegetables”, is a B2B platform offering procurement, delivery and after-sales services to vegetable retailers. After users place an order on the app, the company gets the produce from suppliers and puts them in cold storage units to prevent them from spoiling. The second day after the order is made, the buyer receives their goods from their nearest cold storage unit. The company’s services are now available in Wuhan, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing.
Yu founded Songxiaocai in January 2015 after he resigned from Alibaba in September 2014. While he was at Alibaba, he created Taobao’s rural e-commerce business and china.taobao.com, a taobao section selling specialty Chinese products.
After this round of financing, Songxiaocai launched a plan to find more partners in the upstream supply chain. Vegetable producers, vegetable companies and professional buyers can apply to be partners.
The company will provide its partners with big orders, and it will also show data including purchasing price, selling price and order numbers on its app to ensure that the whole process is transparent to its partners. It will also help promote products.
The plan not only strengthens the company’s supply channels but also helps vegetable producers find a way to sell their products.
Yu’s experience at Alibaba has been helpful to the company’s founding and development. The company received an angel round of RMB 30 million from Wu Yongming, one of Alibaba’s 18 original founders. It also closed a Series A round of financing worth RMB 104 million led by IDG Capital and followed by Puhua Capital and Yuanjing Capital, a fund founded by Wu Yongming.
(Top photo from http://www.xici.net.)
