NGP Capital’s Portfolio Company Meican Completed US$100 Million E-round Financing

November 10, 2021, Beijing, China – Meican (the "Company"), China's leading digital group catering platform, announced today that it has completed E-round financing of US$100 million invested by Centurium Capital, a leading private equity investment management firm in China. The financing is expected to enhance Meican's capabilities and investments in product research and development, global customer acquisition, supply chain diversification, and human resources development.

NGP Capital invested in Meican’s B-round financing in 2013 and made substantial follow-on investment in its C-round. We have witnessed the growth of Meican during our partnership in the past years.

Founded in 2011, Meican today is China's largest group catering solutions provider. The Company offers comprehensive catering solutions to corporate clients and their employees, including both on-premise and off-premise catering and SaaS solutions. Meican's digital platform of the group catering industry connects the user end, corporate end, merchant end, and operation end. It digitalizes the overall dining process and group catering management, as well as helping corporate clients implement the catering policies efficiently, supporting the overall dining and payment process, and constructing the complete closed loop of the group catering service chain. Meican's data-based group catering tech-enabled system assists the traditional group catering models with the digital and intelligent transformation.

The Company’s clients include Bytedance, Alibaba, SF Express, China CITIC Bank, Pacific Insurance, SASAC, Peking University People’s Hospital and China Southwest Aviation University, and numerous others. Based on its Diversity of Suppliers and Digital Innovation strategies, Meican has transformed and modernized the traditional group catering industry.

Statistics show that the group catering market in China exceeded RMB1.5 trillion in 2020, serving 670 million customers while growing at over 15 percent annually. However, the Chinese group catering industry is still very fragmented, with a CR10 (market share of top 10 players) of less than five percent in China, which is in sharp contrast with a CR10 of 60 to 80 percent in developed markets such as the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea. This demonstrates huge growth and consolidation potential.

Xiao Zhao, Co-founder and CEO of Meican, commented, “Thanks to increasing penetration of digitalization and demand for a better group catering experience, the industry is going through a profound transformation. We will continue to invest in the diversification and digitalization of our supply chain to further upgrade the overall industry infrastructure and solidify our market-leading position. Witnessing the synergy between our foodservice business and tech-enabled business, we are confident that Meican will accelerate its growth and expansion to further tap into the trillion-yuan group catering market."

Today, Meican’s products and services cover nearly 100 cities across China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuhan, and serve thousands of corporate customers and merchant partners.