SATURNBIRD

Saturnbird (三顿半) is a Chinese specialty coffee brand founded in 2015 in Changsha by founder & CEO Wu Jun, known for defining the freeze-dried instant coffee category — small-cup packets that dissolve in cold water or milk while preserving flavor . After launching its Tmall store in August 2018, it grew fast: it topped the domestic coffee brand category on Singles' Day 2018, then overtook Nestlé in 2019 to become the first Chinese brand to lead Tmall's coffee category, with that year's Double 11 sales ten times the prior year's . FreeS Fund led its Pre-A round in early 2019 — its first institutional funding — and followed on through the Tianfu-led A/A+ rounds and a Sequoia China-led B round in March 2020 at a roughly RMB 800 million valuation . By mid-2021, per LatePost reporting cited in a Frees Fund piece, it had raised a new round in the hundreds of millions of RMB led by CPE at a RMB 4.5 billion post-money valuation, and had expanded into instant tea and oat milk .