Apps catering to the Chinese and wider Asian 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.
The food ordering and delivery app, founded in London and aimed squarely at Chinese and other Asian consumers living outside their home countries, has picked up another $ 55 million. It will use the capital to continue building its existing business and expanding deeper in newer categories like groceries, it said.
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).
Operating as a classic three-sided, on-demand foodie marketplace a la DoorDash or Instacart, HungryPanda said it now has 6 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; and in 2020, when it raised $ 90 million and was in 47 cities. (It’s never disclosed the number of customers before 2024 so 6 million in a fresh number.)
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. This success is a testament to the dedication and hard work of our entire team,” said Eric Liu, HungryPanda’s founder and CEO, in a statement. “HungryPanda is more than just a delivery platform—we see ourselves as an ambassador of Asian cuisine. With this new funding, we are poised to accelerate our expansion into North America, elevate our services, and continue to champion the richness of Asian food culture on a global scale.”
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. We have reached out to investors and the startup to ask and will update as 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. Valuation is not being disclosed, but for some context on that, the last valuation PitchBook lists is from 2020 and is just over $ 289 million. However, given that it’s raised $ 275 million to date and the size of its gross transactions and growing footprint, that figure is likely to be higher now.
Eric Liu founded HungryPanda out of his own direct needs. As a student at the University of Nottingham, he found that while there were Chinese restaurants in the city, they found it nearly impossible to order from them. Menus were in English and the translations were nearly meaningless and the food had been sometimes criminally adjusted to meet British palates.
As Liu has told us previously, this was a bigger deal than it might be for some other groups of expats: Chinese people prefer to eat “traditional” food, 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, including items that typically might only be offered on side menus to Chinese customers in Mandarin, if at all, if you are eating in the restaurant itself.
At least initially — the company has grown a lot from its early roots — HungryPanda’s focus on younger eaters, 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 around two deliveries per hour per driver to make an hour profitable, HungryPanda was used by people ordering “family style” and doubling or tripling or more per delivery, making individual journeys more profitable. It’s notable that other apps catering to a wider pool of users have adopted some of those mechanics over the years — a sign of it working.
Even without being an app for all consumers, HungryPanda and its ilk are targeting a sizeable market. The Chinese diaspora of first-generation consumers alone is estimated now to be at over 50 million people globally. That is before adding in other generations of immigrants and other countries beyond China.
This has proven to be a winning formula and one that seems to be driving some substantial revenue even beyond food consumption. Not only are there a number of other apps that have sprouted up also targeting Asian consumers on the hunt for more authentic food, but there are examples of how a swarm of consumers, chattering about authentic Asian food, have created whole destinations out of some towns — witness a sudden surge of young Chinese visitors to Dusseldorf, after Chinese users in the city started posting about the food available there on social media app Xiaohongshu.
