36氪首发丨「CAYE咖爷科技」完成近亿元新一轮融资，咖啡机已批量进店，年产能可达1万台

36Kr has learned that the commercial fully automatic coffee machine brand "CAYE Coffee Technology" (hereinafter referred to as "CAYE Coffee") has completed a new round of financing of nearly 100 million yuan. This round is led by Meituan Longzhu, with the old shareholder Hillhouse Ventures and individual investors participating.

CAYE Coffee is a local commercial fully automatic coffee machine brand. 36Kr previously had continuous tracking and reporting on its model. CAYE Coffee was established in December 2022 and was founded by Wu Peng, the former co-founder of Dreame. Based on the self-developed Bionic Barista system, it innovatively designs processes such as coffee grinding, powder weight control, powder distribution and compression, and pressure extraction, and launched the commercial fully automatic coffee machine "Smart X" series this year.

This financing is the second round of financing completed by CAYE Coffee this year. Previously in April this year, they just completed tens of millions of yuan in Series A financing. Earlier, in March and December 2023, CAYE Coffee successively completed angel round and Pre-A round financing. So far, the investors include Hillhouse Ventures, Meituan Longzhu, Renzhi, Metric & Heng, Leading Venture Capital, Gengxin, and Suzhou Venture Capital.

In the past six months, CAYE Coffee's coffee machine products have moved from the factory to chain stores. Wu Peng told 36Kr that the products are currently in mass production, and some chain customers have entered the stores in batches. Wu Peng said that CAYE Coffee has two typical types of customers, one is the boutique coffee chain, and the other is the commercial coffee chain, and there are many well-known coffee chain brands.

The commercial fully automatic coffee machine belongs to the upstream industry of coffee. In the past, it was dominated by old overseas manufacturers, including Schaerer, Franke, Thermoplan, WMF, etc. In contrast, local brand manufacturers are obviously at a disadvantage. However, CAYE Coffee still found a business breakthrough from it.

When talking about the reasons why existing customers choose CAYE Coffee, Wu Peng told 36Kr that the core is the high-quality requirement under the efficiency of cup production. In his opinion, this is the primary concern of the current coffee chain. In the final analysis, quality is also the key for consumer goods to reach the end. "There are three manifestations of product quality, the powder-liquid ratio, TDS value, and professional blind test," Wu Peng said. In the selection of cooperative customers, CAYE Coffee fully meets the standards and definitely wins the blind test.

The Smart X series uses self-developed core components, including the AccuPowderWeigh high-precision powder weight control system, VVD (Vertical Vibrating Distribution) vertical vibrating powder distribution technology, SuperMix milk foam technology, CLS closed-loop control system, etc., to ensure that both the production efficiency and quality are greatly improved.

CAYE Coffee shows its confidence in the product in many aspects. Wu Peng told 36Kr that during the industry exhibition, CAYE Coffee will disassemble the coffee machine for display, "(We are) the only one in the entire venue that dares to disassemble the components and core modules and show them to all professional customers and peers."

Core components of CAYE Coffee products

For the global target markets, CAYE Coffee has also made sufficient patent evaluations in advance and cooperated with local law firms to issue an FTO (free to operate) report. "We believe that after this arduous work is completed, our business in various parts of the world will be further expanded."

However, technology is only one of the considerations for coffee chain brands to choose coffee machines. Wu Peng told 36Kr that when competing with international leading manufacturers, local new brands have two main disadvantages. One is stability. The products of established manufacturers have been in the market for a long time, and the product stability has been tested by time. The second is brand power.

CAYE Coffee is trying to narrow the gap. In the past six months, in addition to the batch entry of products into stores, CAYE Coffee also opened a coffee shop in Suzhou Industrial Park to start a "violent" test, completely simulating the real production scene of the store. From 9 am to 10 am every day, 100 cups of coffee are concentratedly produced, including various common drinks on the market such as milk coffee and special blends.

In contrast, the shaping of brand power still takes time and is more challenging. For some coffee chain brands, when purchasing coffee machines, they will be more cautious and choose the same coffee machine used by the leading peers, that is, "the same as xxx". Wu Peng interprets this decision-making behavior as "based on the bottom line principle, not the upper limit principle."

The Chinese coffee chain is a typical red ocean in a blue ocean market. After the continuous price war represented by 9.9 yuan coffee in recent years, the pattern of chain brands is facing a reshuffle. However, CAYE Coffee believes that local fully automatic coffee machine brands still have many development opportunities.

From the market perspective, the product boundary between coffee and tea beverages is becoming increasingly blurred. It has become an industry standard for tea beverage brands to launch coffee product lines. Previously, 36Kr reported that Gu Ming has recently launched coffee products in batches in its stores. In addition, tea beverage brands such as Heytea, Mixue, and Chabaidao have also launched coffee products or sub-brands.

It is worth mentioning that among the investors of CAYE Coffee, Meituan Longzhu and Hillhouse Ventures have investment layouts in catering chain brands, such as Heytea, Gu Ming, and Mixue Bingcheng. Behind this round of financing of CAYE Coffee, it is not ruled out that the investors will help integrate and coordinate the upstream and downstream industries of coffee.

In addition to the local business, CAYE Coffee is also actively developing the global market. According to Wu Peng, currently CAYE Coffee has entered nine countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, and the United Kingdom, directly cooperating with local coffee chain customers, and indirectly serving more than 50 countries and regions through local service providers.

In terms of after-sales service, CAYE Coffee has established a three-dimensional after-sales service system in the past six months. On the one hand, it has established its own technical service team. In addition, it has also established long-term cooperation with the leading service companies in the industry to provide technical service support for global customers.

In terms of production capacity, currently CAYE Coffee's own factory has an annual production capacity of up to 10,000 professional-level commercial coffee machines, and the annual production capacity of the outsourcing factory can reach 100,000 units.

The funds obtained from this round of financing, CAYE Coffee plans to use for the expansion of the global market and the research and development of new product categories. According to Wu Peng, in addition to the commercial series, CAYE Coffee has already planned to develop a new home-use product line.