Burnaby-based Asian-food delivery company Fantuan has expanded to the U.K. with initial service in London, according to the company.
Randy Wu and Yao Fei founded Fantuan in Burnaby in 2014, when Wu was a student at Simon Fraser University. The duo then expanded to Toronto in 2016. Venture financing helped it launch in the U.S. in 2019. The company said that it now operates in 40 cities across North America. Obtaining further financing helped the company launch operations in Australia in March, with service in Sydney and Melbourne.
The fast-growing company pinned its 2020 revenue growth at 400 per cent, and its 2021 revenue growth at 200 per cent.
The company's app enables customers to order from hundreds of restaurants, much like industry giants such as DoorDash Inc. (NYSE:DASH) and SkipTheDishes. Most of Fantuan options are Chinese food, while the others are restaurants that specialize in dishes from other Asian countries. The company's expansion into having English-language apps has increased the number of restaurants that are not Asian-focused, and about 20 per cent of the options are now not Asian restaurants, spokeswoman Crystal Li told BIV.
While Fantuan's app is normally available on app stores for Android and iOS in English and Chinese, Li said that the English-language version of the app is temporarily not available in the Apple app store because it is being updated.
Fantuan employs about 120 people at its Burnaby head office, she said. That includes software developers, finance staff and other workers. It also employs more than 10,000 delivery drivers, and an unspecified number of customer service representatives in China.
Fantuan is not the only Metro Vancouver-based food-delivery company with big aspirations.
Vancouver-founded Tiggy recently launched a grocery-delivery business in which it aims to deliver customer orders within 15 minutes of the order being placed. It started operations in Vancouver in September, and then expanded to North Vancouver and Toronto earlier this year. CEO Eugene Bisovka told BIV that he plans to next expand to Burnaby.
