DST Global’s Yuri Milner. Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch, under Creative Commons license

Venture capital firm DST Global has led a 200 billion South Korean won ($160 million) Series E investment in Kurly, a Korean grocery delivery startup. Other venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital, Fuse Venture Partners, SK Networks, and Translink Capital also participated in the funding rounds alongside DST Global. The Series E investment adds up the total funding raised by Kurly, a five-year-old startup, to 420 billion won ($328 million), the company said.

Kurly said it recorded revenue of 429 billion won in 2019, as first reported by Deal Street Asia. With the new funding, Kurly will ramp up hiring and customer acquisition and will also build a new large fulfillment center in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, Deal Street Asia reports. The new fulfillment center is aimed to be 2.5x larger than Kurly’s current fulfillment facilities.

The funding announcement confirms previous reports of Kurly having secured funding that may have valued it at about $1 billion or more, reports that emerged in April. Even as the coronavirus pandemic has negatively affected many businesses, the business of grocery delivery has not just remained intact but has actually soared as many people resort to on-demand grocery deliveries in the wake of advised social distancing efforts that have led many to avoid shopping in-person.

Grocery delivery has undoubtedly boomed in this period and Kurly’s fundraising is apparently a testimony to that. For reference purposes, America’s Instacart, a leading grocery delivery service, has been so overwhelmed by the demand for grocery deliveries that the number of its shoppers exploded from 180,000 during the start of the coronavirus pandemic to about 500,000 currently. Such proves the assertion that grocery delivery has very well boomed during this current pandemic.