Shangyue Closes RMB 58 Million Pre-A Round, Launches Intelligent Procurement SaaS | FreeS Fund Deal News

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Investor Perspective

Yao Yuan, Early-Stage Project Lead, FreeS Fund

Email: yaoyuan@freesvc.com

Procurement is one of the most critical business functions for any enterprise. On one end, it connects to complex internal supply chain management systems; on the other, it taps into vast internet resources. It's a crucial entry point for digital and intelligent transformation under the broader trend of industrial internet.

Shangyue provides intelligent procurement SaaS applications, building dedicated internet-based procurement platforms for each enterprise. This dramatically optimizes procurement efficiency and reduces costs, while enabling efficient digital connectivity between businesses — giving it the potential to become a platform-level company in the B2B space.

In less than a year since founding, Shangyue has signed contracts with multiple industry-leading enterprises and completed delivery. This is powerful validation of the team's capabilities, product strength, and commercial viability.

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Shangyue Raises RMB 58 Million in Pre-A Round, Launches Intelligent Procurement SaaS Application

Source: Shangyue

Beijing Shangyue Network Technology Co., Ltd. (www.sunyur.com, hereafter "Shangyue"), a procurement digitalization SaaS company, held its 2019 Summer Media Event in Beijing on August 14, 2019. At the event, Shangyue announced the completion of a RMB 58 million Pre-A financing round, led by Yuanjing Capital with Huiyou Capital and Zhiyi Capital participating. Shangyue had previously raised RMB 39 million in angel funding on January 16, 2019, with all four original investors — Yinxingu Capital, SIE Industry Fund, FreeS Fund, and Dingju Venture Capital — following on in this round.

Shangyue completed two rounds totaling RMB 97 million within eight months, bucking the trend in a cautious investment climate.

Miao Feng, Shangyue's founder and CEO, said at the event: "Market demand has exceeded our expectations. The primary use of this round's proceeds will be to increase R&D investment and build out our delivery and operations team, preparing us to better serve existing signed clients and reach a broader customer base."

• Shangyue is an enterprise procurement digitalization SaaS provider, founded in November 2018. Its core founding team brings together talent from Alibaba, Deloitte, Yonyou, B-Link, and Oracle, with members bringing over ten years of cross-domain experience in procurement and supply chain, e-commerce, software, and internet.
• Shangyue focuses on digitalizing the procurement of non-production, general-category materials, helping enterprises achieve online, automated procurement. Through its intelligent procurement middle platform, Shangyue builds dedicated procurement marketplaces for enterprises, enabling fully online and digital procurement processes that improve efficiency and reduce costs.
• Alongside this funding announcement, Shangyue launched two SaaS applications — "Shangyue Procurement Marketplace" and "Collaboration Network" — designed to serve large and medium-sized enterprises with annual revenue between RMB 1 billion and 100 billion, providing an integrated service that combines online and digital procurement into a closed loop.

In the ten months since its November 2018 founding, demand for procurement digitalization among large and medium-sized enterprises has far exceeded Shangyue's initial projections, while enterprise acceptance of the SaaS model has reached maturity. Shangyue currently provides procurement digitalization solutions to seven industry-leading enterprises including Lianjia Group, Great Wall Motor, Guangxi China Tobacco, Ningbo Huaxiang, OPPO, Zhaopin, and Huasheng Haoche, working with clients to establish procurement benchmarks in their respective industries. Key sectors served include manufacturing, retail, internet, and real estate infrastructure.

▍Procurement RPA Solutions, Building the Foundation for the Intelligent Procurement Era

Currently, procurement management at large and medium-sized enterprises is characterized by fragmented scenarios, numerous business nodes, and complex transactional workloads. Traditional procurement management remains stuck at low levels of informatization — manual management and paper-based processes — with low day-to-day operational efficiency and inability to precisely capture data across all business nodes.

Beyond extending Shangyue's leading position in core procurement digitalization technology, the Procurement Marketplace and Collaboration Network products emphasize continued innovation and investment in procurement intelligence. Together, these two products form Shangyue RPA Solution 1.0. This not only addresses the problems of cumbersome and complex procurement processes at large enterprises, insufficient communication between requesting departments and procurement departments, inventory buildup, and tied-up working capital and corporate resources — it also automates current manual tasks by simulating human operations. This improves work efficiency while avoiding errors that can occur in manual processing, making enterprise procurement faster, more flexible, and more sustainable.

Meng Lingzhi, Shangyue's VP of Product, stated:

• The dedicated "Shangyue Procurement Marketplace" platform that Shangyue builds for enterprises is based on cloud-native architecture and delivery models, enabling rapid construction of business applications. The overall architectural design helps enterprise clients address the changing business needs and innovation requirements that arise during digital transformation.
• The platform's underlying development and operations capabilities integrate internet operations expertise with leading distributed architecture, establishing a solid foundation for enterprise clients to support high-concurrency scenarios.
• More importantly, the middle-platform capabilities of the "Shangyue Intelligent Procurement" platform enable clients to organically combine technical capabilities, RPA (robotic process automation) capabilities, and business capabilities, delivering closed-loop services around business scenarios that allow clients to rapidly respond to and innovate on business requirements.

▍How Did They Raise Against the Headwinds?

China is in a momentous transition from informatization to digitalization. From day one, Shangyue chose a cloud-native architecture and a SaaS-based approach to enterprise procurement tools, deliberately starting with general-category materials procurement to address enterprises' current fragmented purchasing situations.

Regarding the changes and trends ahead, Shangyue founder and CEO Miao Feng stated at the event: "Innovation will lead enterprises into the intelligent procurement era. In the future, enterprise procurement of general-category materials will become process-driven and automated, with digital and automation technologies bringing intelligence to the entire procurement workflow. Shangyue will pursue a product strategy that is standardizable, scalable, and SaaS-based, driving the deep practice of intelligent procurement across all industries in China."