Shanghai, April 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- At the end of March, the “JD Equity Crowdfunding” campaign surged forward, leveraging the advantages of the JD Finance platform and adopting a “lead investor + follower investor” model. Eleven entrepreneurial projects from different fields, participated in by multiple well-known domestic investment institutions and angel investors, were the first to go live on the JD crowdfunding platform. As one of the initial partners, Gobi Partners led the investment in two of these projects – the food O2O brand “Jacket’s Shrimp” and the overseas travel service provider “Shifang Travel.” Within just a few hours, both companies achieved oversubscription ahead of other projects.
“Jacket’s Shrimp”is a company that provides crayfish delivery services, specializing in high-quality spicy cuisine. It delivers directly from its own central kitchen to customers' dining tables, offering a fully upgraded “Spicy 2.0” product. Jacket’s Kitchen was established last year, and within just eight months and with zero yuan in marketing expenses, it relied solely on diners sharing via WeChat Moments and word-of-mouth to build a considerable core consumer base, quickly winning over an increasing number of urban foodies.
“Shifang Travel” is an overseas travel company focused on providing unique travel experiences. It is committed to collaborating with travel experts worldwide to create a platform for customized independent travel products. By having experts design routes, more people can enjoy distinctive travel experiences, thereby addressing the common issues and pain points of mass tourism such as “group tours lacking depth” and “independent travel being too troublesome.”
Gobi Partners has long been focused on China’s O2O and online travel sectors. Its previous investments include “Tuniu Travel,” which has successfully gone public on the NASDAQ in the United States, as well as O2O companies such as “020 Food Delivery,” “Dianwoba,” and “Life Radius,” all of which have demonstrated strong market performance. The participation in investing in “Jacket’s Shrimp” and “Shifang Travel” is the best testament to Gobi’s continued confidence in the growth of these two sectors and its in-depth involvement in them.
Jiang Tao, a partner at Gobi Partners, said: “In the current trend culture where young people can’t do without spicy food, health and brand culture are the next consumption explosion points. Among the hundreds of billions of yuan spent annually on spicy food in China, leading internet brands have yet to emerge in the category of spicy cooked foods and snacks, with crayfish as the leader. Jacket’s Shrimp perfectly fills this gap. Their product quality far exceeds that of similar products, their cash flow performance is excellent, and their strategy of combining no physical stores with a central kitchen, along with a same-city one-hour delivery service, greatly lowers the barriers to explosive order growth and city expansion. Moreover, the team has an outstanding understanding of brand culture, whether in the R&D of spicy products or the creation of spicy culture, constantly impressing us and catching our eye.”
As for Shifang Travel, Jiang Tao believes: “In 2014, China had 118 million outbound trips, maintaining a rapid growth rate of 18%. With the upgrading of consumption, the emerging Chinese middle class has an increasingly strong demand for ‘high-quality, unique experience travel.’ Shifang Travel is tapping into this most promising market. They offer a ‘fun and worry-free’ unique travel method, where travel experts design personalized, high-quality, experience-focused local specialty routes, and the company is responsible for integrating and planning offline services and resources, enabling consumers to travel with just one click. The uniqueness of the product and the high barrier to offline procurement form their competitive moat, while also helping to maintain profit margins in the highly competitive online travel market. Their founding team is young and passionate about travel, with a unique understanding of travel products that stems from core user pain points, abundant expert resources, excellent learning abilities, and execution skills, all of which make us extremely optimistic about the future of Shifang Travel.”
As of 11:00 AM on April 3, Jacket’s Shrimp had raised 7.3137 million yuan, achieving 182% of its funding target; Shifang Travel had raised 5.0097 million yuan, achieving 200% of its funding target, becoming veritable star projects on the JD crowdfunding platform.