Weee, an online grocer specialising in Asian and Latino goods, is betting that America’s appetite for ethnic food and grocery delivery will outlast a sharp drop in immigration, with its founder forecasting years of double-digit growth even as the Trump administration tightens border controls.
The San Francisco-based company has seen its annual revenue grow at about 30 to 40 per cent from 2023 to 2025, and is expecting to expand at the same pace in the next five to 10 years, founder and CEO Larry Liu said in an interview with the South China Morning Post last week.
Valued at US$4.1 billion from its previous private funding round in 2022, Weee saw its annualised revenue recently surpass US$1 billion and is a year away from being profitable, the Chinese-American founder said.
“This is our eleventh year, and we are barely scratching the surface,” Liu said.
Liu is optimistic about growing Weee’s user base even as US President Donald Trump’s administration launched an unprecedented clampdown on immigrants in the country that has been marked by arrests, detentions and deportations.
The US has seen “a historic decline” in net international migration, which peaked at 2.7 million in 2024 but dropped to 1.3 million as of July 1, 2025, the US Census Bureau said in January. The number is projected to further decline to around 321,000 in 2026 if current trends continue, the bureau said.
“I think immigrants will continue to come to the country, that’s my belief,” Liu said.
“For most people, they don’t have easy access to ethnic food, so they have no choice but to buy what I call mainstream food. But I think we are changing that.”
Liu started Weee in 2015, with an initial focus on helping Chinese immigrants in the US make group purchases of hard-to-find produce, such as slabs of pork belly used for sausage making or fresh seafood from a local fisherman.
“I saw something really interesting happen at the time. It was the rise of WeChat among Chinese immigrants, and I saw a lot of people forming WeChat groups to buy things together,” Liu said.
The first iteration of Weee was created as a software tool that could help group-buying organisers collect orders and connect with vendors more easily.
Although successful for a few months, Liu realised that the group-buying model – which supported only a handful of products – did not sufficiently address people’s need for easy access to thousands of different goods.
“So after people had to wait for a week to get a fish [from group buying], for example, they still had to drive a long distance to a Chinese market to buy the other ingredients,” he said. “Group buying revealed an opportunity, but group buying itself is not the solution.”
Weee in 2017 made what Liu described as a “pretty difficult pivot” to its current grocery delivery model, which required the company to expand its product selection from a few hundred to thousands and to build its own warehouses and logistics network from the ground up.
The app today offers more than 300,000 types of goods from countries including China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand, covering everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to instant and frozen food products, as well as seasonings and other dry goods.
The company last year also launched MasGusto, a separate app that specialises in Latino goods, which Liu said had also seen “very strong” demand.
Last year, 1.5 million people made purchases on Weee, according to Liu, and he expects user growth to keep pace with the company’s revenue.
Weee’s growth coincided with the continuous expansion of online grocery shopping in the US after the Covid-19 pandemic. In December, US e-grocery sales surged 32 per cent year over year, reaching a record high of US$12.7 billion, after November sales saw a 29 per cent year-over-year jump, according to Brick Meets Click, a grocery industry analytics platform.
David Zhang, a Chinese national living in Washington, D.C., was formerly a regular at Asian supermarkets while living in Atlanta, Georgia, where he turned to Amazon Fresh during the pandemic for grocery delivery. Shopping for essentials online has stayed a habit post-pandemic, he said, and in 2022 new user discounts prompted him to try Weee.
“I was surprised that Weee combined advantages [of multiple platforms] in that it offers both comprehensive Asian goods and fresh produce,” Zhang said. “Currently, it meets about 90 per cent of my daily needs.”
US consumers’ demand for Asian products has also grown along with the increasing popularity of Asian culture, according to Liu.
“Just look at Netflix. A lot of Asian dramas and movies became huge in the US,” Liu said. “I think that’s also why we saw more and more mainstream Americans buying from us.”
In the first half of 2025, the year-over-year foot traffic growth of Asian grocery stores including H Mart, Patel Brothers and Mitsuwa Marketplace outpaced the overall grocery segment, according to a report in September last year by Placer.ai, a location analytics platform.
It also said that shoppers spend more time in these grocery stores than in mainstream supermarkets and are more likely to visit them on weekends, suggesting that these East and South Asian grocers are “experiential, destination-driven retailers rather than routine errand stops”, the firm said.
“If I had to name a rival [for Weee], it would be local brick-and-mortar supermarkets like Costco, Harris Teeter or Trader Joe’s, where the everyday produce and meat might be a bit fresher,” said Zhang, adding that one of the drawbacks of Weee is the inconsistent quality of fresh vegetables.
“But unless I’m already out for a meal and it’s on the way, I’m not going to go out of my way to visit a physical Asian grocery store any more.”
Addressing competition from physical Asian stores, Liu said that the company doesn’t “try to convince people to buy from us if they have easy access to an offline supermarket.”
“If they are served well by the offline [stores], whether Indian stores or Chinese stores, that’s great. There’s plenty of opportunities for us out there,” Liu said.
Liu called ethnic grocery delivery “a very, very hard business to run”. It demands rigorous processes and quality control while managing a multifaceted workforce – ranging from software engineers and warehouse staff to a diverse team of drivers, as well as employees tailored to the specific ethnic communities they serve.
“So how can you make all these people from very diverse backgrounds work towards a common goal under the same corporate umbrella? It takes a certain type of culture. You have to be extremely transparent, you have to be very inclusive,” he said.
Weee is not the only e-commerce platform offering Asian grocery delivery in the US. Yami, founded in 2013 and backed by investors including J.P. Morgan and GGV Capital, said in 2022 that it had more than 2 million customers and offered more than 4,000 brands. Yami did not immediately respond to an interview request from the SCMP.
Liu said that Weee has a different focus from Yami, which primarily serves the student population who don’t cook, while Weee tries to serve people who want to cook at home.
Liu also doesn’t see competition coming from other tech companies, as “everybody is chasing AI now”. “I don’t think it’s trendy to invest in food or grocery delivery,” he said.
Today, Weee sources about 30 to 40 per cent of its product offerings domestically and imports the rest. That was why some of the most challenging times for Weee came last year amid the US global trade war, according to Liu.
“It was quite challenging last year because there was a lot of uncertainty, not just the tariff itself, but also where all the tariffs would land,” Liu said. “For our business, a lot of the products we still have to import regardless of tariffs. We just need to deal with that.”
But things have since “stabilised”, and the tariff picture is now “a lot clearer”, Liu said.
Liu, a graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, worked as an engineer for Intel, which dispatched him to the US in 2003. Before founding Weee, he also completed an MBA at the University of California, Davis, and worked in finance at several tech companies in the US.
Weee has so far raised more than US$800 million from investors including SoftBank, Blackstone, DST Global, iFly.vc and Lightspeed Ventures.
While it has “enough cash to be self-sustainable” and thus no immediate plans to raise more funds, being a venture-backed company, an initial public offering “is a logical next step”, Liu said, without sharing details of its listing plans. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
