JD.com

JD.com, also known as Jingdong and formerly 360buy, is a Chinese retailer that sells goods directly to consumers online and runs its own logistics network. Richard Qiangdong Liu founded the business on June 18, 1998 as a seller of magneto-optical products; its online retail site went live in 2004 and it built an in-house delivery operation from 2007. The domain changed to JD.com in 2013. The company is headquartered in Beijing and reported more than US$194 billion in 2025 revenue, which Wikipedia describes as making it China's largest retailer by revenue.

The F-1 filed in January 2014 shows how its pre-IPO capital was assembled. An entity controlled by Capital Today China Growth Fund held its series A preferred shares, and HHGL 360Buy Holdings, owned by HCM Fund, held series C preferred shares and in February 2012 exercised warrants for about US$65 million. DST Global funds bought ordinary shares for about US$314 million in April 2011, and about US$432 million more in June 2011. Sequoia Capital China funds and Insight Venture Partners funds bought shares for about US$215 million in June 2011. In November 2012 Tiger Global 360Buy Holdings paid US$75 million and Classroom Investments paid US$175 million, and in February 2013 Kingdom Holding affiliated funds and others paid about US$400 million. Tiger Global funds held a board seat right before the offering. In March 2014 Tencent received 15% of JD's shares in exchange for its e-commerce businesses and a strategic partnership.

JD.com priced its Nasdaq IPO on May 21, 2014 at US$19 per ADS under the symbol JD, raising about US$1.78 billion including selling shareholders, and Wikipedia puts its valuation at the time near US$26 billion. Liu retained about 83.7% of voting power through a dual-class structure. JD added a Hong Kong listing in June 2020 and has since listed JD Health, which took US$830 million from Hillhouse Capital before its 2020 IPO, and JD Logistics. Walmart, which took a stake in 2016 when it sold Yihaodian to JD, sold its holding of about US$3.7 billion in August 2024.

JD.com is an example of growth-stage capital doing most of the work in a Chinese consumer company: hundreds of millions of dollars from DST, Tiger Global, Sequoia China and sovereign and strategic investors arrived in 2011 to 2013, a few years before the IPO, rather than in classic early rounds. The strategic Tencent stake right before listing also shows how traffic partnerships were traded for equity in China's internet sector.