HungryPanda, a food-ordering app for the Asian diaspora, picks up $55M at a valuation of around $500M

Apps catering to the Chinese diaspora, especially urban consumers focused on food, can be big business. Now, HungryPanda, one of the trailblazing startups in that market, is announcing more funding to double down on the opportunity.

The food-delivery app, founded in London and aimed at Chinese and other Asian consumers living outside their home countries, has picked up $55 million. The company will use the capital to continue building its existing business and expanding into new categories like groceries, it said, as well as to make more acquisitions and update its tech, specifically with a focus on more AI and machine learning to optimize operations.

HungryPanda is not disclosing its valuation, but we understand from sources that it is now in the region of $500 million post-money. For context, the last valuation PitchBook lists is from 2020 and is just over $289 million. The startup has raised $275 million to date.

The startup, founded in 2017, claims to be the largest of the Asian overseas food delivery platforms, competing against the likes of Fantuan (based out of Vancouver) and GrubMarket-owned FreshGoGo (based out of New York). Just as both of these rivals have grown by acquisition, so too has HungryPanda, picking up EASI in Australia and BUY@HOME in New Zealand.

Operating as a classic, three-sided, on-demand food marketplace à la DoorDash or Instacart, HungryPanda said it has 6.5 million customers, 100,000 merchants and 80,000 riders across 80 cities in 10 countries. The company’s footprint has grown over the years. When it last raised funding ($130 million in 2021), it said it was live in 60 cities; in 2020, when it raised $90 million, it said it operated in 47 cities. (The first time it disclosed customer numbers seems to be earlier this year, when it said it had 6 million, so that number has grown, too.)

HungryPanda said it’s aiming for $1 billion in gross transaction volume for this year, and it is already profitable.

“Reaching profitability while maintaining significant growth demonstrates the strength of our business model and our long-term vision,” said Eric Liu, HungryPanda’s founder and CEO, in a statement.

The company is describing the capital as a “refinancing and fundraise,” implying that some of this is primary and some possibly secondary and/or debt. It declined to comment on the structure of the financing. We have reached out to investors to clarify and will update if we learn more. Mars Growth Capital (a JV between Liquidity Group and MUFG) is leading the round, with previous backers Perwyn, Kinnevik, 83North and Felix also participating.

Eric Liu started HungryPanda after wanting such a service himself. As a student at the University of Nottingham, he discovered that while there were Chinese restaurants in the city, Chinese students like himself found it nearly impossible to order from them. Menus were in English and the translations were nearly meaningless, and sometimes the food had been criminally adjusted to meet British palates.

As Liu has told us previously, this was a bigger problem than it might be for some other groups of expats: Chinese people prefer to eat “traditional” food, he said, and they take the business of eating very seriously.

HungryPanda was his solution: An app, in Chinese, that provided all the information to students like him in a format that they could actually use. It would include items that typically might only be offered on side menus to Chinese customers in Mandarin, if at all, if they were eating at the restaurant itself.

HungryPanda’s initial focus on the younger demographic, specifically students, helped it bypass some of the trickier unit economics of food-delivery platforms. While apps like Deliveroo were built around the idea of making two deliveries per hour, per driver to make every hour profitable, HungryPanda was used by people ordering “family-style,” where orders are doubled or even tripled — making individual deliveries more profitable. It’s notable that other apps catering to a wider pool of users have adopted some of those mechanics over the years.

That has evolved since HungryPanda now targets a wider group of customers beyond students living in dorms, but Liu believes it’s still nailed matching what it offers to what its users want, which it plans to apply now also to groceries.

“Thanks to our combined Eastern and Western cultural background, we not only comprehend the operational challenges that Asian food merchants face abroad, but we also have a thorough grasp of the needs of Chinese and Asian expats living overseas,” Liu said in an emailed interview. “This allows us to effectively and accurately meet the demands of both sides, ensuring a seamless connection between supply and demand.”

While geopolitical tensions may tell one story about how China interfaces with the western world, the actual movement of people tells another story about how societies and cultures are mixing. The Chinese diaspora of first-generation consumers alone is estimated now to be at over 50 million people globally — and that is before you count further generations of immigrants (such as the children of first-generation immigrants born abroad), as well as people from Asian countries beyond China.

Originally the app was only available in Mandarin — it really did focus on one specific market — but in more recent years, and especially as HungryPanda has expanded to more countries, it’s incorporated local languages into the mix.

That’s partly because the app has scaled to providing services to a wider group of Asian customers, which might also include second- or third-generation people who don’t speak native languages as well, but also because HungryPanda has found wider popularity with foodies who are not Asian but simply like to seek out authentic food experiences.

“HungryPanda is more than just a delivery platform — we see ourselves as an ambassador of Asian cuisine,” Liu said.

The app is available in English, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Korean, Liu told TechCrunch.

The formula is popular enough that a number of other apps targeting Asian consumers abroad have sprouted up and those too have found traction around food experiences. Swarms of consumers, chattering about authentic Asian food, have even created whole destinations out of some towns. Dusseldorf, for example, saw a surge of young Chinese visitors after Chinese users in the city started posting about the food available there on social media app Xiaohongshu.

Updated with more details on valuation and comments from the CEO.