Fantuan secures $40M to bring authentic Asian cuisine to your doorstep

Fantuan, a Vancouver-based company, has made it their mission to recreate the experience of Chinese food delivery platforms in Western countries. One of its significant strengths is its ability to bring on board a wide array of authentic Chinese and other Asian restaurants.

• The Dawn of Fantuan: The company, which gets its name from the Chinese term for rice balls, has been serving authentic Asian cuisine to global customers for nearly a decade. Recently, Fantuan secured a whopping $40M in a Series C funding round.

• Investors on Board: The funding round was spearheaded by Celtic House Asia, a venture capital firm investing in first-generation immigrants, and GrubMarket, a food supply chain startup that hit a $1B valuation in 2021. Other significant investors included Vision Plus, established by Alibaba’s new CEO Eddie Wu, and boutique private equity firm JSD Capital.

• Additions to the Investor Pool: The investment round also attracted several key players in China's retail tech sector, including the co-creators of Ele.me (an unmanned convenience store chain), Qunar (a GGV-backed travel booking site), and Dianping (China's Yelp counterpart).

• Company Founders: Fantuan was founded in 2014 by Randy Wu while he was an economics student at Simon Fraser University. He initially ran the business singlehandedly, even personally delivering food around Vancouver. Later on, he was joined by co-founder Yaofei Feng, a former software engineer at Amazon.

• Target Audience: The founders identified a burgeoning market in Western countries' growing appetite for high-quality Asian food. According to a 2020 report by the International Organization for Migration, nearly 10 million international migrants are of Chinese heritage.

• User Statistics: Fantuan boasts impressive stats with a user retention rate of around 90% after five orders within 24 months. Among the two million registered accounts, 1.2 million are active users.

Fantuan has been a profitable venture since just two years after its inception, only losing this status when it embarked on an aggressive expansion into the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company's annual revenue is projected to near the $100M mark this year.