Chinese food delivery startup nabs $500k angel investment

Apparently, Chinese O2O startups with “Call a ____” in their name are all the rage in China these days. Just weeks after Call a Chicken raised its US$1.6 million angel round, another food delivery startup called Call a Delivery has netted its own angel funding.

The round, which was led by a Hunan venture capital firm, totaled RMB 3 million, or about US$480k. According to Chinese news site Iyiou, Call a Delivery founder Song Mingjia claims that the investment values the company at RMB 30 million (US$4.8 million).

Like similarly-named services Call a Chicken and Call a Duck, Call a Delivery is an O2O food delivery service. It offers classic Chinese dishes which users can order via the web, a mobile app, or through WeChat. If you’re feeling hungry, don’t log on just yet, as the service hasn’t actually gone live. It does have an official site, though, on which the company writes it hopes to be “the Xiaomi of food delivery.”

Raising an angel investment before having an actual product to show isn’t an insignificant achievement, but there’s no denying that the company faces difficult days ahead. China’s online market already has tons of better-funded players in the online and mobile food delivery space. Aside from the aforementioned Call a Chicken, for example, there’s Ele.me (which just raised US$350 million), Daojia (which recently raised US$50 million), and Line0 (which recently raised US$30 million) just to name a few. All of those startups are also backed by major, established internet companies.

Like any startup, Call a Delivery does have at least the potential to succeed. But China’s food delivery market is getting increasingly crowded, and it will need to offer something truly impressive when its service launches to set itself apart from all the more powerful competition.