WI Harper Group | February 10, 2021 | Source: PR Newswire
WI Harper backed GrubMarket completed a $60 million series D financing in October 2020. Today, GrubMarket has raised an additional $30M, bringing a total of $90 million of financing to an oversubscribed Series D round. Investors include: funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, ACE & Company, Celtic House Venture Partners, Sixty Degree Capital, The Strand Partners, Reimagined Ventures, Trinity Capital Investment, Madison Bay Capital Partners, Marubeni Ventures, GGV and others.
WI Harper Group previously participated in GrubMarket’s $60M series D financing in October 2020 and led its $25 million C+ round of financing in April 2019. This is another significant milestone for the company after the acquisition of Bengard Marketing, Inc.
Founded in 2014, GrubMarket is an e-commerce platform that offers foods from local farms, fisheries, commercial kitchens, certified home kitchens, and restaurants at wholesale prices.
“I want to thank all of our supporters. Series D round was many times oversubscribed as we originally intended to raise no more than $30 million. We have made quite some efforts to keep this round under $100 million. Such oversubscription continues to happen in the current pre-IPO round,” said Mike Xu, CEO of GrubMarket. “Delivering ultra-high growth and profitability remain the priority in all of our geographies. With this injection of capital, we will deepen our investment in people, technology and acquisitions to reach the next level of success. Our objective is to grow our ARR by $200 million in the first quarter of 2021 and expand to most of the regions of the country to reach $1 billion of ARR within the next 12 months. Moreover, we will keep following the fundamentals of conducting a sustainable business and maintain profitability as the foundation of this company. Above all, the only and ultimate success criterion of my entrepreneurial pursuit is whether I can scale up GrubMarket to eventually achieve $100 billion of annual sales.”
The company’s business comprises commercial segment to grocery stores, meal-kit companies, and restaurants, direct-to-consumer segment and WholesaleWare, its vertical software business, which is gaining significant momentum in recent months, growing over 1,000% and managing hundreds of millions of dollars of food wholesale activities annually.
This investment round follows a series of major milestones – expanding to 4 new states in 2020 including Washington, Texas, New York and Massachusetts and continued growth in Northern and Southern California and Michigan. Today, the company operates from over 30 warehouses across California, Washington, Texas, Massachusetts, New York and Michigan, and with plans to expand to other major metro markets in North America.
GrubMarket was a first mover to re-architect the highly intermediated B2B food supply chain by establishing a producer-centric platform with clear price advantage for market participants, exclusive producer / customer relationships and retention rates of over 95%. GrubMarket’s B2B customers include over 5,000 grocery stores, over 8,000 restaurants, and over 2,000 corporate offices. Whole Foods, Kroger, Albertson, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, Raley’s Market, 99 Ranch Market are all among its customers. Its meal-kit and e-grocery customers include Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Fresh Direct, Imperfect Foods, Misfit Market, Sun Basket and GoodEggs, etc.
“I am always so impressed by the progress of GrubMarket and the unfaltering vision of Mike,” said Charles Lorenceau, Managing Director of ACE & Company. “Having a proven record of sustained hyper-growth and profitability, GrubMarket stands out as a rare Silicon Valley startup in the food technology and ecommerce segment,” said Jay Chen, managing partner of Celtic House Venture Partners. “GrubMarket’s creativity and capital efficiency is unmatched by anyone else in this space. Mike’s team has done an incredible job growing the company thoughtfully and sustainably. We are proud to be a partner in the company’s rapid nationwide expansion and excited by the strong momentum of WholesaleWare, their SaaS suite, which is the best we have seen in space.”
| About GrubMarket
GrubMarket’s mission is to make fresh and healthy food accessible to everyone. We are committed to providing individuals, retailers, and restaurants with the best online food e-commerce experience possible, by regularly offering a spectacular array of farm-fresh foods at prices that are up to 50% OFF what you’d typically find from regular grocers or wholesalers.
| About WI Harper Group:
WI Harper is a pioneer and leading cross-border venture capital firm investing in early and expansion stage companies globally. With offices in San Francisco, Beijing, and Taipei, the firm actively oversees more than $1 billion in assets under management. Since inception nearly three decades ago, WI Harper has invested in over 400 startups and has successfully experienced more than 100 IPO and M&A exits.
We look for innovative companies and visionary founders in healthcare, technology and sustainability fields where there are high synergies and meaningful value added cross selling opportunities. While our healthcare team is presently honing on bioinformatics and digital biology, our technology team is focused blockchain, big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, AR/VR, IoT, robotics, drones, autonomous driving, as well as digital media and green energy projects.
