Chinese industrial products e-commerce platform ZKH Industrial Supply Co., Ltd has completed a $315 million Series E financing round led by YF Capital, a PE firm co-founded by Alibaba’s Jack Ma and David Yu in Shanghai in 2010.
State-owned China Structural Reform Fund Corporation, and CIC International — China Investment Corporation’s overseas investment subsidiary — were the “joint lead investors”, ZKH said in a statement on WeChat on Wednesday.
With the latest financing, the total corpus raised by ZKH has crossed 4.5 billion yuan ($671 million), and the latest round is also the largest funding in the field of industrial products, ZKH said.
GLP and Xiamen C&D Group’s joint fund GLP-C&D Equity Fund, and Xiamen C&D Inc are the two new investors who participated in the fundraising. Existing investors who re-upped include American global hedge fund Tiger Management, Tencent Holdings, MatrixPartners China, Legend Capital, Genesis Capital, supply chain-focused Eastern Bell Capital, and Shenzhen-based Cowin Capital.
Chinese new economy-focused investment bank China Renaissance facilitated the transaction.
Funding from the current round will be allocated to products, services, technology, and team management, as well as to enhance supply chain capacity.
ZKH, which was set up in 1996 in Shanghai, is a business-to-business (B2B) platform for industries. It distributes industrial products including adhesives, lubricants, and equipment, and it also provides MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) solutions to enterprises through the integration of e-commerce channels and offline networks such as regional service centers, logistics operation, and smart storage management.
The platform has forged over 8,000 partnerships and counts more than 15,000 clients, it claims. “We believe ZKH can significantly contribute to China’s manufacturing innovation through its digitalised one-stop service platform,” said Na Li, a partner at YF Capital, in the statement.
Before the fresh update, ZKH closed seven rounds of funding. It had garnered $160 million in a Series D round from Tencent, MatrixPartners China, Legend Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, and Shang Qi Capital in 2019. In 2018, it had also pocketed a $129 million Series C funding from Tiger Global, Shell, and Oriza Holdings, among others.
