Thailand’s CP Group, controlled by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont and his family, has invested $10 million in South Korea-based Gopizza as the pizza chain startup seeks to expand in the populous Southeast Asia region.
The investment was made by CP Croup’s convenience store arm, CP All, which operates 7-Eleven stores in Thailand. The deal marks CP All’s first investment in an overseas startup. CP All recently announced plans to boost its retail network, investing up to 13 billion baht (about $350 million) this year to open new stores and invest in new projects, among others.
Gopizza’s founder and CEO, Jay Lim, who was on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2019, declined to disclose the valuation the deal places on the company.
CP All’s decision to invest in Gopizza was helped by the chain’s track record of selling pizzas in GS25 convenience stores in South Korea. “We went to CP and told them, ‘Let’s do it with 7-Eleven in Thailand,’ ” says Lim in a video interview. “It makes perfect sense now that it’s a proven business model.”
GS25 convenience stores are operated by GS Retail, the retail arm of the Hur family’s South Korean conglomerate GS Group. The venture capital arm of GS Group, GS Ventures, is also a strategic investor in Gopizza. Other backers of the company include CJ Investment, the corporate venture arm of South Korean billionaire Lee Jay-hyun’s food-to-entertainment conglomerate CJ Group; South Korean billionaire Park Hyeon-joo’s Mirae Asset Securities; and NCore Ventures, whose portfolio includes Southeast Asian used-car marketplace Carro and Fortnite-maker Epic Games.
Lim founded Seoul-based Gopizza in 2017 and made its first overseas expansion in 2019, entering India, the most populous country in the world. Gopizza expanded into Thailand in 2023, setting up a store in a Lotus’s supermarket, which is also operated by CP. Gopizza also has stores in Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan. The company currently has about 450 stores and plans to open as many as 1,000 new locations this year, says Lim.
“India and Southeast Asia are our main markets, so it makes perfect sense that we work with CP, a big conglomerate in Southeast Asia,” says Lim. “As a startup, we want to grow indefinitely, but Korea is a very competitive market and has a shrinking population, so food and beverage companies don’t have a bright future.” Gopizza plans to expand into the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan in the near future, adds Lim.
CP’s investment brings the loss-making startup’s total funding to date to 60 billion won (about $45 million). Lim says he expects Gopizza to break even by the end of the year, thanks to rising sales overseas and reducing marketing spend.
Lim says Gopizza’s secret sauce is its partially baked (“parbake”) dough. “The most difficult part of the operation in the pizza industry is the dough,” says Lim, who has worked at a pizza chain in preparation for starting Gopizza. “You have to mix the dough and then you have to let it rise and then you knead it with your hands. So it takes a lot of space, time, skill and labor.”
But Gopizza’s parbake doughs are pre-made and distributed frozen. “So you just pop it open and you can start making pizza right away,” says Lim. “It reduces a lot of space and labor and time, and that’s why we can deliver pizzas in five minutes in spaces like a convenience store.”
To be sure, other pizza chains can use their own parbake doughs, but because it’s not fresh, the pizzas made from it won’t taste as good. Lim says he invested in technology and factory operations to make parbake doughs as good as fresh ones when defrosted.
“It took a lot of money and time. For the last seven years, we were developing dough every single day,” says Lim. “But I’m a very stubborn problem-solver.”
