Thailand’s Line secures US$ 110M and merges with Wongnai

Line Man, a Thailand based food delivery platform, has raised US$ 110M from BRV Capital Management. It also announced its merger with a Thai restaurant review and discovery platform Wongnai Media Co Ltd.

Menlo Park-based venture capital firm BRV is also an investor in e-commerce payments processor Paypal and Google-owned online mapping company Waze. It did not disclose the size of its stake in the start-up.

About Line Man

Japanese chat app LINE Corp launched Line Man in Thailand in 2016. It is an on-demand assistant application with 6 professional services to serve the customer’s needs at all times. Its services include good delivery, convenience goods delivery, parcels, messenger and taxi-hailing.

Line Man launched Mart service earlier this year to provide door-to-door grocery delivery. It promotes its role as a shopping assistant that delivers grocery orders to the user’s doorstep. Line Man partnered with Happy Fresh and Naver Ventures to strengthen its service offerings.

The service is currently available in Bangkok and many other areas including Nonthaburi, Pattaya City, Samutsakorn, Ayuthaya, Chonburi, and Chiang Mai.

Furthermore, Line Man is battling competitors such as Indonesia’s Go-Jek, Singapore-based Grab, and Germany’s Foodpanda for a place in the delivery business in Thailand.

Statements from Line Man

“This is the first time that any entity in the Line Group has secured a financial investment of this size for one of its overseas services. This capital investment aims to strengthen the newly merged entity and expand its development,” Line said in a statement.

Line plans to widen operations this year to 15 more regions, beyond the nine provinces where it currently operates.

Eunjung Lee, Head of Global Business for Southeast Asia at Line Plus Corporation, said that the investment from BRV “will help take Line Man to the next level”. Additionally, BRV said that it decided to invest in Line Man because of the startup’s “ongoing success at delivering innovate services for the Thai market”

Merger with Wongnai

The delivery service will merge with local restaurant aggregator Wongnai. Wongnai currently has more than 10M users per month whereas Line Mas has 3M users each month. Wongnai operates in nine cities across Thailand. It has a database of over 400,00 restaurants, the largest restaurant database in the country.