Textile-focused ecommerce firm Baibu closes $300m series D round

Guangzhou-based business-to-business textile trading platform Baibu (not to be confused with the search engine Baidu) has closed its series D round, with investors pouring in US$300 million. It was the largest ever fundraising round in China’s textile industry, 36Kr reported on Monday.

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The investment was led by DST Global and joined by Baibu’s early investors, including CICC Capital, Source Code Capital, Tiger Global Fund, Yunqi Parters, Chengwei Capital, and Bull Capital Partners. China Renaissance served as the exclusive financial advisor.

Zhao Zhenhong, who founded Baibu in 2014, said the new funds will be used on research and development, logistics upgrades, and collaborations with factories producing unbleached and undyed fabrics.

Baibu’s sales volume reached nearly 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) in 2019, according to data provided by the company.

China’s traditional industries, including textile manufacturing, are digitalizing their operations. This development has attracted attention from venture capital firms.

In September, another textile startup, Smart Fabric Textile Technology, which was founded in Shenzhen in 2014, closed its series C round led by Tencent and Sequoia, bagging US$100 million.

Smart Fabric features a cloud-based enterprise resource planning system, which coordinates links in the supply chain for textile manufacturers. The system takes orders from brands and garment factories, then uses its IoT-powered production scheduling systems to disassemble and distribute the orders to manufacturing nodes, separating the work processes of spinning, dyeing, and weaving.

This report was first published on KrAsia.