Guangzhou-based B2B textile trading platform Baibu—not to be confused with the search engine Baidu—has closed its Series D round, with investors pouring in USD 300 million. It was the largest ever fundraising round in China’s textiles industry, 36Kr reported on Monday.
The investment was led by DST Global and joined by Baibu’s early investors, including CICC Capital, Source Code Capital, Tiger Global Fund, Yunqi Parters, Chengwei Capital, and Bull Capital Partners. China Renaissance served as the exclusive financial advisor.
Zhao Zhenhong, who founded Baibu in 2014, said the new funds will be used on research and development, logistics upgrades, and collaborations with factories producing unbleached and undyed fabrics.
Baibu’s year-to-date sales volume has reached nearly RMB 10 billion (USD 1.4 billion), according to data provided by the company.
China’s traditional industries, including textile manufacturing, are digitalizing their operations. This development has attracted attention from venture capital firms.
In September, another textile startup, Smart Fabric Textile Technology, which was founded in Shenzhen in 2014, closed its Series C round led by Tencent and Sequoia, bagging USD 100 million.
Smart Fabric features a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which coordinates links in the supply chain for textiles manufacturers. The system takes orders from brands and garment factories, then uses its IoT-powered production scheduling systems to disassemble and distribute the orders to manufacturing nodes, separating the work processes of spinning, dyeing, and weaving.
36Kr is KrASIA’s parent company.