ELE.ME

Founders: Mark Zhang, Jack Kang
Key people: (CEO)
Number of employees: 1,111

Ele.me is a platform that offers online food delivery service. It was founded in 2008 by Mark Zhang and Jack Kang in Minhang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Ele.me (roughly means “Hungry now?”) is a professional online-to-offline (O2O) catering platform in China. It was founded by Mark Zhang and Jack Kang in Minhang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2008 and now is developed and operated by Lazhasi Network Technology (Shanghai) Co., LTD. By the end of December in 2016, Ele.me has covered more than 1400 cities in China, with more than one million joining shops, 15 thousand staff and more than nine million daily order. Also, over three million riders have registered Fengniao Delivery (the sub-service of Ele.me). With “Make Everything (in) 30min” as the mission, Ele.me “applies innovative technologies and creates a world-leading local living platform to provide the customers with pure at-home experiences”. This platform not only takes 700 million citizens into a “30min-convenient life”, but also offers the franchisees integrate operational solutions to promote the digitalization of the catering and retail industry.

History

On 27 January 2015, Ele.me finished its Series E financing with $350 million invested by CITIC PE, Tencent Holdings, JD.com (Joybuy), Hongshan Capital (Sequoia Capital) and Dianping.com.

On 28 August 2015, Ele.me announced the completion of its Series F financing with $630 million. The investment was led by CITIC PE and Hualian Group, followed by new investors like China Media Capital (CMC), Gopher Asset as well as the original investors including Tencent Holdings, JD.com (Joybuy) and Hongshan Capital (Sequoia Capital).

On 24 November 2015, Ele.me got the strategic investment of Didi Chuxing.

On 17 December 2015, Alibaba Group invested $1.25 billion to Ele.me.

On 1 March 2017, Ele.me announced that they will launch “Food Security Service” App.  Restaurants that are suspected of violating the law will be synced to the supervision department, and this function now covers all the restaurants in Shanghai.

On 8 March 2017, Ele.me announced that 5,257 restaurants were found to violate the rules and were removed within one week.Additionally, 258 restaurants were removed in Sichuan province.