SHEIN's quiet IPO and the inside story of its $100B valuation era
elsewhere别处发生 · wechat · 2026-09-01
SHEIN went public this week in notably low-key fashion: founder Sky Xu almost skipped the ceremony, showing up in a plain SHEIN t-shirt after deciding last-minute. Four years ago the company was valued at $100B with investors scrambling for allocation. This piece recounts that fundraising history: IDG's Lian Meng invested after one meeting in 2016, Sequoia China's Zou Jiajia spent six weeks surveying Guangzhou's textile markets before closing in 2018, and in 2022 a US PE firm parachuted in an investor to jog with Xu in Singapore chasing allocation — and still didn't invest.
The closing question: with hype cycles rotating every few years, could today's AI boom be SHEIN four years ago — and are the sharpest eyes already hunting for the next decade's SHEIN?
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