When Nie Yunchen opened a milk tea shop in Jiangmen, Guangdong, he couldn’t have known what he was unleashing. Barely a decade later, fuelled by its runaway popularity among young people, his company Heytea has more than 650 stores in mainland China and has expanded to Hong Kong and Singapore. After raising $595.1 million in funding from investors including Sequioa, Tencent and Temasek, it’s valued at more than US$9 billion.