Coffee vending machine hot self-service coffee brand Yee Coffee Series A financing 80 million

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Recently, the self-service coffee brand Yi Ka received 40 million A round equity financing and 40 million debt financing from Shanghai Yongwu Investment. Wang Jing, founder of Yika, said that this round of financing will be used to expand the market and optimize the quality of service. In addition, in early 2018, Yika has received tens of millions of pre-A rounds of financing from Xinzhongli, totaling more than 100 million.

When talking about coffee, many people first think of physical coffee shops such as Starbucks and Costa, which not only sell coffee, but also provide leisure and social services for users. Secondly, take-out coffee brands that have sprung up in recent years, including coffee and Luckin coffee, meet the needs of white-collar workers who want to drink coffee. There is no doubt that these two models meet the rigid needs of users. There are also unmanned self-service vending machines that have sprung up in recent years, because they occupy a small area and are close enough to users, that is, buy and go, which has become the gospel of impulse consumers.

But unlike other cafe brands, Yika, which was founded in August 2016, focuses on campus scenes. 'The original idea was very simple, 'Mr. Wang said.' it was about the potential of the market, 'Mr. Wang said. Campus scenes have natural advantages. First of all, the cost of education is low enough, the new generation of children is the iPad generation, very easy to accept and use self-service coffee machine, almost no need to teach; second, for drinks, university is still the stage of user habit formation, tea, milk tea, soy milk, coffee can become the user's choice, who is closest to the user, the first choice In addition, at least 4 years of student life means that this group of users have a higher retention rate.

Open source and cost saving

At present, Yika has been spread in more than 100 colleges and universities and more than 1000 points. Among the undergraduate colleges and universities in the Beijing area, Yika has laid nearly 40, more than 30 985 colleges and universities across the country, and Yika has entered 17, with a repurchase rate of 60%, with a unit price of about 10 yuan. Since the spring of 2017, Yika has entered three semesters with sales of 40 million yuan. At the same time, Yika plans to implement the franchise model and is recruiting suitable franchisees. In addition, after seeing the similar attributes of the airport, high-speed rail station and campus users, Yika is actively choosing points to move in, and plans to build a sales matrix that integrates campus, airport, high-speed rail station and other scenarios.

In addition to open source, Yika is also cutting costs. For Zero Bar and friendly Cafe, which focus on office scenes, office buildings seem to be sold for longer, while the campus has an invalid period of four months a year, which means that sales of Yika will decline off a cliff during the winter and summer holidays. For this problem, Wang Jing's understanding is that the school does have winter and summer vacations, but there are no Saturdays and Sundays on campus. And the long tail time on campus is longer than the eight-hour working day in office buildings.

During the summer and winter holidays, Yika also took some measures. For example, empty some of the raw materials of the machine, seal the machine, and try to keep the cost to a minimum. In addition, Yika self-service coffee machine is independently developed by the team, which means that the hardware cost can be controlled, and it can also be made up for by improving the efficiency of operation and maintenance and further reducing the cost of operation and maintenance. At present, Tsinghua Park needs only three or four operation and maintenance personnel for hundreds of machines, and there are even fewer in other parks.

Service supremacy and BD capability

Wang Jing talked about two points about the core competitiveness of Yika. First of all, service is paramount. The essence of Yika is a service-oriented product, or infrastructure. If you want to be needed, you must think what the user thinks. In this regard, Wang Jing adopted an intensive approach. As mentioned earlier, there are more than 100 machines in Tsinghua Garden alone, and some teaching buildings even reach one per floor to meet the needs of users anytime and anywhere.

Secondly, the choice of users is also inseparable from the quality of the product. In terms of raw materials, Yika chose Aishi coffee beans, Nestle milk powder and Hershey chocolate. In the preservation of coffee beans, it is changed every three days. Wang Jing said it took Yika a year to reduce the abandonment rate of coffee beans to 5% through background data and the proficiency of operation and maintenance staff.

The most important, and the core barrier to ecapse, is the team's BD capability. For a campus with a weak commercial attribute, the problem to worry about is that it is difficult to solve with money. Wang Peng, co-founder of BD, said that Yika was not the first brand to enter the campus, but it was the brand with the highest coverage. The key lies in, from the school teacher's point of view, think what the teacher thinks, provide quality service for the school and solve the teacher's problem.

As for the next step of the plan, Wang Jing said that Yika wants to penetrate the campus market and cover the top 1000 colleges and universities in the country; at the same time, as a high-quality communication carrier, the self-service coffee machine also plans to cooperate with advertisers to increase profits and reduce coffee prices again, giving benefits to teachers and students.

In recent years, the coffee track has become a new tuyere, and many contestants have joined the game. But at the end of the interview, Wang Jing explained with a smile, "We didn't think about which tuyere to step on. It was all a coincidence." In the summer of 2016, Wang Jing, who had worked in a foreign company for more than a decade and was familiar with hardware manufacturing, accidentally learned about the project and discussed it with several alumni at that time.