The drive was 40 minutes each way. When Larry Liu relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area from Shanghai - via Intel's offer of a US engineering role - he discovered that the nearest Asian supermarket was in South Sacramento, and it carried Vietnamese products. He was looking for Chinese ingredients. The round trip ate up most of an afternoon.
Most people adapt. Liu filed it as data. The gap between what immigrant communities needed and what American grocery chains bothered to stock was not a niche problem - it was a structural failure hiding inside a demographic that mainstream buyers had simply decided wasn't big enough to serve. Liu decided that was the business.
That insight - serve the customer no one else is fighting for - now powers Weee!, a $4.1 billion company delivering over one million orders every month to customers in more than 40 US states. In 2024, Weee! crossed $1 billion in annual revenue. It is the largest and fastest-growing Asian online grocery platform in North America, and it got there without Liu ever having to compete directly with Walmart or Costco.
Wuhan to WeChat to Unicorn
Liu grew up in Wuhan, Hubei province - a city known for its freshwater fish, lotus-flavored dishes, and a food culture that runs deep into daily life. He chose the English name "Larry" in high school, after watching NBA tapes of Larry Bird, the Boston Celtics legend whose reputation for calm, precise, unshowy dominance apparently stuck with the future founder.
He studied electrical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, then received a job offer from Intel for a US position. A visa delay sent him first to Intel's Shanghai branch in 2002. He arrived in America shortly after, worked as a product development engineer, then redirected his trajectory entirely: he enrolled in the MBA program at UC Davis Graduate School of Management (graduating in 2008) and moved into finance at Brocade, where he progressed from senior cost accountant to senior financial analyst over three years.
Between the finance career and Weee!, there was Happitail - an e-commerce startup Liu founded that used algorithms to identify price arbitrage across major shopping platforms. It was profitable. It was also a rehearsal: Liu was learning the mechanics of online retail, logistics, and what it takes to build a supply chain from scratch, before he attempted it at scale.
"Chinese Americans make up less than 2% of the U.S. population. As a Costco buyer, I would never care about that 2%. So for them, it was a structural issue - and that meant I didn't have to worry about competing with Walmart or Costco."- Larry Liu, Founder & CEO, Weee!
The WeChat Insight
Weee! launched in January 2015, but its origin predates the company by months. Liu noticed something specific: Chinese immigrants were using WeChat - the dominant messaging super-app back in China - to organize group purchases of hard-to-find food items. Not because they enjoyed logistics. Because there was no better system. Communities were solving their own grocery problem with group chats and spreadsheets.
Liu's first version of Weee! was a WeChat group-buying platform for Chinese groceries. The model was borrowed directly from what he observed - minimum order quantities, coordinated delivery windows, communal purchasing. It worked well enough to reveal the underlying demand. It also revealed why group-buying was the wrong architecture: coordination costs, inflexibility, a model that optimized for bulk over experience. He abandoned it and rebuilt around a full e-commerce stack.
By 2017, Weee! was operating as a conventional online grocery - but with a catalog no conventional grocer would touch. Chinese pantry staples, fresh produce used in East Asian cooking, items that required cold-chain handling and niche supplier relationships. The Bay Area was the testing ground. Seattle came next, in 2019.
Pandemic as Proof-of-Concept
COVID-19 arrived in early 2020 and rewired American grocery behavior overnight. Weee! was already running next-day delivery at a time when most people had never ordered groceries online. Revenue grew 700% year-over-year. Liu has acknowledged the pandemic's role honestly: "It played an important part in our profitability." He had built the infrastructure. The world suddenly needed exactly that infrastructure.
The expansion that followed was disciplined. Rather than chasing Instacart's model of rapid white-label delivery for existing supermarkets, Weee! extended its own curated catalog across seven ethnic cuisines: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, and Hispanic. The aggregation logic was deliberate - serving any single ethnic community would face a density problem in most US cities. Serving seven communities simultaneously changes the math.
Seven cuisines. One platform.
SoftBank Bets $425 Million
In March 2021, Weee! raised a $316 million Series D that valued the company at $2.8 billion. Eleven months later, in February 2022, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $425 million Series E that pushed the valuation to $4.1 billion. Total funding reached $895.9 million. Liu had turned a WeChat experiment into a company bigger than most regional grocery chains.
Funding history
Hollywood Calls - Already a Customer
In May 2022, Liu announced that Jon M. Chu - director of Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and more recently Wicked - had joined Weee! as Chief Creative Officer. The detail worth noting: Chu was already a customer. He had been using the app to order Korean BBQ ingredients before Liu made the call. The CCO role was not a marketing stunt - Chu brought a filmmaker's instinct for storytelling to what Liu was building: a social commerce platform where food is content, not just commodity.
Weee! was integrating short-form recipe videos, community features, and cultural storytelling into the shopping experience - a model Liu had observed in China's tech giants (Alibaba, JD.com) and adapted for American consumers. Chu became the chief articulator of that vision.
"We see grocery shopping, especially for immigrants, as an opportunity to discover exciting new things that they may not even know exist in the U.S."- Larry Liu
The MasGusto Move and SNAP Acceptance
In March 2025, Weee! launched MasGusto - a standalone app specifically for Latino grocery customers. The same thesis, new market: aggregating demand from a community that mainstream retailers consistently underserve. A month later, in April 2025, Weee! became the first online Asian supermarket to accept SNAP/EBT benefits through a partnership with Forage.
The SNAP move was more than a payment feature. It opened Weee!'s catalog - authentic, culturally specific, often imported goods - to lower-income communities who had been buying from whichever physical store was nearest, regardless of whether it carried what they actually cooked. Liu was extending the original insight downward in the income bracket.
The Career Timeline
One Thing, Done Well
Liu is unusually candid about his entrepreneurial philosophy. He does not romanticize the serial-founder circuit. When asked about business heroes, he invokes Sam Walton - not for the wealth, but for the commitment: Walton started Walmart and never did anything else. He spent an entire life building one thing. Liu finds that kind of single-mindedness more impressive than a portfolio of exits.
"I'm not attracted to so-called serial entrepreneurs," Liu said. "I admire people who just try to do one thing super well, the best in the world."
Weee! is his one thing. He was still at it when the company hit $1 billion in revenue. He was still at it when the IPO question came up in February 2026 - which he answered by calling it a "logical next step" without attaching a timeline. For a man who took ten years to cross a billion in revenue, that's not evasiveness. It's consistency.
What's Next
Liu has projected 30-40% annual growth over the next five to ten years. Weee!'s B2B offering - launched in 2024 as Weee! Business, targeting restaurants and food-service operators - adds a new demand vector. MasGusto is early. SNAP acceptance opens the platform to demographics it couldn't reach before. The product catalog, at over 300,000 unique SKUs, already exceeds what any physical Asian supermarket could realistically stock.
The IPO question is no longer hypothetical - it's a matter of timing. Liu's instinct, based on everything he has said publicly, is to get the business right before the public debut. One thing at a time.