China’s CAYE raises nearly $56 million to expand coffee machines

CAYE closed a nearly RMB 400 million Series B round led by Meituan Longzhu, giving the Suzhou Industrial Park company fresh capital to scale fully automatic coffee machines for café chains in China and beyond. The deal was described as the largest single financing in the commercial fully automatic coffee machine sector so far, a sign of how hard this equipment category is heating up.

Founded in December 2022, CAYE has moved fast for such a young company. It says it brings R&D, manufacturing and sales under one roof in Suzhou Industrial Park, and that it is the first company in China to specialize in fully automatic coffee machines built on a fully self-developed high-efficiency brewing system. Borui Capital, Hillhouse Ventures and Suzhou Venture Capital Group also took part in the round.

The company’s machines are already out of the factory and into chain-store deployment, with some customers receiving products in batches. That matters in a segment where operators care less about novelty and more about repeatable shots, throughput and how quickly a machine maker can support a rollout across multiple locations. New capital can help CAYE do more than ship units, it can back the service network, production line and product iteration needed to keep those contracts in place.

CAYE’s technical pitch goes well beyond a basic automatic brewer. The company highlights a “Bionic Barista” system that automates grinding, weighing, spreading, tamping and extraction. PitchBook has also described technologies in the lineup such as vertical vibrating distribution, reverse gravity extraction and closed-loop quality control. For café operators, that mix points to a machine built around consistency and tighter process control, not just speed.

The funding also fits the company’s earlier plans to widen its reach. CAYE had already been looking at global expansion and new product categories, including a home-use line, which suggests the company wants to play both the chain-café and consumer sides of the machine market. In a category dominated by established espresso-equipment names, that makes CAYE part of a broader China-to-global coffee-tech push, with commercial automation, production scale and international partnerships now sitting at the center of the fight.