Club Factory Raises $100M Series D For Cross-Border E-commerce Site

Club Factory, a China-based cross-border e-commerce company, has raised a $100 million Series D, according to various news reports.

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Qiming Venture Partners led the round, which also included participation from Frees Fund, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, Bertelsmann, IDG Capital and “Fortune 500 companies in Asia and the United States,” according to the Economic Times. The financing brings Club Factory’s total known venture raised to a known $220 million, according to Crunchbase data. Interestingly, its last raise was a $100 million Series C in February 2018. (I say interestingly because it’s unusual for companies to raise the same amounts in their Series Cs and Ds.)

In the fall of 2013, then 25-year-old Vincent Lou left his job at Facebook to start Club Factory. According to the company’s website, Lou “never expected to work in fashion, but a passion for great products and frustration with the lack of transparency in price, led him to build Club Factory.”

The company claims to sell “trending items” for 50 to 80 percent less than what they would go for on other popular e-commerce sites such as Wish, eBay and Amazon. It does this by letting customers shop directly from factories it finds with its patented big data technology.

In September, KrAsia reported that India had become Club Factory’s biggest market. According to the publication, Club Factory had “pipped Snapdeal in terms of monthly active users (MAU) to rank third behind Amazon and Flipkart,” which is based in India.

According to Economic Times, Club Factory has seen more than 10x growth in the past six months for its Indian SME business largely due to its zero-commission strategy, “where the sellers are able to transfer the cost-benefit to the users.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias