Larry Liu Delivered North America’s #1 Asian Grocery App

After spotting an underserved market, Larry Liu turned Weee! into a $4.1 billion Asian grocery platform serving millions across the nation.

For years, Asian communities in America struggled to find ingredients needed to recreate traditional recipes. Asian grocery stores were far away and there was always a limited selection of product, but when Larry Liu ran into this problem, it also sparked an idea.

Larry Liu was born in Wuhan, China and graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. After graduation, he was able to get a job at Intel, which later relocated him to the United States, allowing him to also earn his master’s at UC Davis’ Graduate School of Management in 2008.

While he was working and in school, Liu would sell electronics on eBay, opening up an interest in online retail. In 2015, Liu and his friends decided to launch an e-commerce platform in the Bay Area, calling it Weee!. It started as a WeChat group buying service that connected immigrants with hard-to-find ingredients. Customers would text back and forth, then wait a week to get the product and drive somewhere nearby to pick it up.

In 2017, the company pivoted from group buying to an online grocery delivery service and was able to expand to Seattle. Once the pandemic hit in 2020, the demand for online grocery delivery surged and Weee! opened up their offerings to tens of thousands of items including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, and Latin American ingredients.

Under Liu’s leadership as CEO, Weee! was able to raise over $800 million in funding from major investors and turn the platform into North America’s #1 Asian grocery app. Weee! has fulfilled tens of millions of orders and following its Series E funding round, it has reached a valuation of $4.1 billion.

Larry Liu started Weee! as a small WeChat group experiment and transformed it into a nationwide platform giving millions of immigrant families access to familiar foods and solving a deep problem that helped reshape the grocery delivery industry.