Cathay Innovation Leads Integrated Furniture Supply Chain Startup Hok Bee’s USD 25 Million Series A

März 5, 2021
Asien

Hok Bee, an innovative home furnishing retail-tech startup, today announced the successful completion of its $25 million Series A funding round led by global venture capital firm Cathay Innovation. The investment will primarily serve to consolidate its supply chain capabilities and expand the reach of Hok Bee’s multi-channel marketing and supplier network.

A leading Chinese player in supply chain for home furnishings, Hok Bee provides furniture manufacturers with an integrated platform for a range of services and retail SaaS solutions to support wider offerings and product assortments of merchants through operational efficiency, supply chain and systems optimization.

The Chinese furniture sector today is worth approximately RMB 900 billion (USD 139 billion) with considerable growth potential. However, the fragmentation of the market coupled with evolving and diverse customer preferences over the past two decades has led to higher prices for consumers and shrinking profits for manufacturers. Given the continued shift in retail channels, the traditional sales model is no longer sustainable.

Empowering the home furnishing industry through digitalization and supply chain optimization is key. Many companies have tried and failed to upend the status quo through pilot projects, but they faced an overwhelming shortage of data and in-depth insights into the integration of digitalization and supply chains.

Through years of experience, Hok Bee has established its advanced proprietary model for the digital management of home furnishing supply chains and is now at the forefront of Chinese supply chain integration. The company adapts the principles of internet thinking to the home furnishing industry, pushing process innovation through the evaluation of results in order to make more accurate and need-based product selections prior to launching factory-built sample productions. This operations pattern helps foster a standard, structured, and systematic supply chain, reduces the reliance on manual inputs,and facilitates quality control across the board.

Ma Jun, Partner of Cathay Capital: „The digital empowerment of the home furnishing industry is an unstoppable shift. Data collection and its numerous applications are key enablers for the industry and will generate massive resource optimizations and efficiency gains. Hok Bee has accurately identified the difficulties facing the market and has created value for both dealers and consumers by solving them thanks to its unique model. Cathay Capital has focused on and invested in the home furnishing industry for over a decade. Our portfolio companies, notably Sofia, Sogal, and ZBOM Home have benefited from our ecosystem as they grew into industry leaders. We hope that through our global ecosystem, Hok Bee will enjoy a further boost in development while advancing the digitalization of the home furnishing industry to the next level.„

Zhao Qiming, founder of Hok Bee: „Over the past ten years that we have been active in the home furnishing industry, we have systematically improved, innovated and integrated supply chain and system operation services, striving to empower our partners. Cathay Capital’s professionalism and efficiency are truly impressive, and we are delighted to partner with such strong supporters of entrepreneurship. This partnership will help us continue and accelerate the realization of Hok Bee’s mission of creating value for consumers, partners and society as a whole.“

About Hok Bee :

Hok Bee provides integrated furniture supply services and retail SaaS for brick-and-mortar furniture franchisees through an innovative S2B2C model. It empowers clients with numerous product assortments and diversified styles. It also helps optimize their operational efficiency and bridges offline to online supply chains through its digital tools.

About Cathay Innovation

Cathay Innovation is a global venture capital partnership, created in affiliation with Cathay Capital, investing in startups at the center of digital revolution across North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Its global platform unifies technology investment across continents, investors, entrepreneurs and leading corporations to accelerate startup growth with access to new markets, invaluable industry knowledge and introductions to potential partners from the start. As a multistage fund with over $1.5 billion assets under management and offices across San Francisco, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore, Cathay Innovation partners with visionary entrepreneurs and startups positively impacting the world through technology. To learn more, please visit www.cathayinnovation.com or follow us on Twitter @Cathayinnov.