Chinese Grocery Delivery Startups MissFresh, Dingdong Maicai To Go Public In US

Chinese grocery delivery startups MissFresh and Dingdong Maicai have filed to go public in the U.S. as people continue shopping online for the delivery of everyday essentials, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday (June 9). 

Both startups bring supermarket food and other goods to some of the bigger and wealthier cities in China. And both are aiming to be the first digital grocery platform in the country to go public.

Headquartered in Beijing and launched in 2014 by Co-founders Bin Zeng and Zheng Xu, MissFresh is backed by Tencent and has raised a total of $1.7 billion in funding over 10 rounds. The startup’s revenue in 2020 was nearly $1 billion, up 73 percent from 2018, according to the WSJ.

Shanghai-based Dingdong was co-founded in 2017 by Onno Faber, Leonard van Driel and Jorn van Dijk. Backed by SoftBank, the startup has raised $1.3 billion across seven rounds. Its reported income last year was $1.7 billion, almost three times more than in 2019.

Dingdong is aiming to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DDL, with plans to sell $100 million worth of shares, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

MissFresh is planning to list on Nasdaq under the symbol MF, but the startup hasn’t yet disclosed the financing size, and is using $100 million as a placeholder. Sources told Bloomberg that MissFresh could raise anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion. The offering could happen as soon as this year, the sources told Bloomberg.

Research from PYMNTS in May indicated that 17 percent of all consumers indicated they were making use of digital platforms to order and pay for groceries. Of those, 72 percent said they will continue some or all the digital habits adopted during the pandemic, even as the world reopens post-COVID-19. 

In PYMNTS’ ConnectedEconomy series, Fabric CEO Faisal Masud told Karen Webster that the numbers are just part of the story when it comes to the changes retail will experience post-pandemic. He said the numbers don’t capture the size and scale of the shift that is ahead.