Multicultural e-grocer Weee! wants to be “the primary source for food at home,” according to its founder and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Liu. Coming off a year in which its monthly active users grew 150%, Weee! has recently secured $425 million in Series E funding that will do a lot to help it reach this goal.
Founded in 2015, Weee! boasts more than 10,000 locally-sourced and hard-to-find Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, and Latin offerings for customers, typically adding more than 500 new products per week.
This new round comes roughly a year after Weee!’s $316 million Series D round last March and boosts the company’s valuation to $4.1 billion. The new round almost doubles the company’s total fundraising, bringing it to more than $800 million.
Liu has big plans for this new infusion of cash. He wants to deepen Weee!’s supply chain, build relationships with vendors, import more products directly to the U.S., and expand offerings into two more ethnicities.
“We have a really powerful and unique value proposition in targeting underserved communities and want to offer the most amazing assortment for the community,” Liu said. “That is our biggest differentiation, and that strategy is working well for us.”
The company also plans to advance its warehouse automation and artificial intelligence technology in order to offer the most relevant product recommendations to its customers.
Weee! has about 1,500 employees at the moment and will continue to build out a team to scale, especially on the go-to-market side, in which the company has not invested heavily before. “We are a best-kept secret,” Liu said, “and a lot of people didn’t know about us, but we want to make sure people know what we are doing.” In order to help spread the word, in February Weee! hired filmmaker Jon Chu as Chief Creative Officer.
While warehouse automation and marketing are important, for Liu, product assortment and pricing are the keys to growth and continued success. He’s looking to expand Weee! into household and beauty items so that the company can transition from an ethnic-only operation into more of a mainstream store. This seems to indicate that while Weee!’s stated goal is to become the primary source for multicultural food at home, it plans to do much more.
