ByteDance executive leaves to start cross-border e-commerce venture after Shein, Temu success in US

A founding member of ByteDance's flagship Douyin app, the Chinese version of TikTok, has left the tech giant to focus on his own start-up for cross-border e-commerce, as Chinese-backed peers like Shein and Temu gain traction worldwide.

The new venture from Ren Lifeng, who left ByteDance in the second half of 2023, is called Beijing Shumei Wanwu Technology Co. It was incorporated on January 3 with a registered capital of 1 million yuan (US$139,119), according to company registry information provider Qichacha.

The entrepreneur, who two former ByteDance employees say is known for his easy-going personality, was part of Douyin's founding team before the short video app launched in 2016. Specialising in content and operations, Ren later headed Xigua Video, another ByteDance product with a focus on medium-length and long-form video.

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In 2022, he joined Pico, the now-struggling virtual reality unit that the Beijing-based tech unicorn had acquired a year earlier. Prior to that, Ren worked at Baidu Tieba, a popular online forum owned by China's leading internet search giant.

Ren, born in 1987, is the latest in a string of Chinese executives who have recently left Big Tech firms to pursue their own ventures. Wang Huiwen, a co-founder of Meituan, established his own artificial intelligence (AI) start-up last year, then later sold the venture to his former employer.

Jesse Lyu Cheng, a former executive at Baidu, has also recently gained widespread attention for his AI gadget start-up Rabbit, whose handheld R1 device has sold out of five batches of pre-orders since launching earlier this month.

Shumei Wanwu has raised funds from IDG and HongShan, the Chinese spin-off of Sequoia Capital, with a valuation of more than US$50 million, according to domestic blog Tech618, an affiliate of Chinese tech media outlet 36Kr.

The exact business model is not clear yet, but the blog said it may be similar to Shopify's approach to allowing merchants to create independent online stores using the company's e-commerce features on the back end, a model that has become a popular alternative for small businesses seeking to avoid selling exclusively through marketplaces like Amazon.com.

Ren's new focus is unique amid the exodus of Big Tech executives, many of whom are piling into the hot generative AI sector popularised by OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In addition to Meituan's Wang, former ByteDance executives Louis Yang Luyu and Wang Jingjin have also joined or established generative AI start-ups.

Yet Ren is entering a different market segment that has seen its own intense growth recently. Chinese-backed cross-border shopping platforms have been taking overseas markets by storm.

Temu, the Boston-based app owned by Pinduoduo parent PDD Holdings, and Shein, the Singapore-headquartered fast-fashion retailer founded in Nanjing, were the top two most-downloaded shopping apps on Apple's iOS in the US on Tuesday, according to market intelligence firm Data.ai.

China's cross-border e-commerce grew nearly 11 per cent to 15.7 trillion yuan in 2022. Gross merchandise volume for Chinese cross-border retailers accounted for 37 per cent of the global total that year, making it the largest market for such activity, according to the State Council.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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