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发帖数: 441 | 1 Just How Hot Is China Venture? Very!
Apr. 27 2011 - 6:22 pm
By REBECCA FANNIN
You don’t need a meter to gauge that after a two dry years, funds, deals
and IPOs are springing up in the busiest season yet. How long will it last?
Hard to tell, but I do hear echoes of the dotcom boom here.
Let’s count up the IPOs among the leading Chinese venture investment firms.
Qiming Ventures has five Chinese portfolio companies in the cue to go
public soon: ramped up car rental service eHi from Shanghai, dating site
Jiayuan, online video programming PPLive, social networking service
Kaixin001 and kids entertainment site Taomee. GSR Ventures has four IPOs in
the works. DCM is geared up for the debut of China’s Facebook Renren on
the NYSE, closely following last year’s listings of Dangdang and BitAuto.
NetQin Mobile, backed by Sequoia GSR, Ceyuan and Fidelity, is in the lineup
too.
The recent listings of WI Harper-backed data center deal 21Vianet on NASDAQ
and Qihoo 360 on NYSE all add to the buzz.
Consider too the sizeable financings of Chinese startups. GroupOn clone
Lashou raised $110 million from a group including GSR Ventures and Norwest
Venture Partners. Digital travel portal Tuniu nabbed $50 million from
Sequoia, DCM, Highland Capital and Rakuten.
More funds keep coming. Accel-IDG just raised two Chinese funds totaling $1.
3 billion – far larger than its previous funds of $550 million and $750
million. Silicon Dragon has been hearing too about a new, large RMB fund
from a significant Silicon Valley venture firm.
Meanwhile, Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works is closing in on a $115 million
fund raised from several well-known strategic and private investors,
including Yuri Milner of Digital Sky Technologies (think Facebook, GroupOn
and Zynga).
Wasting little time since a September 2009 launch, Innovation Works has
grown to 40 professionals and 25 incubated projects, with the vast majority
already in product development. Examples include Zhihu, a Quora-like service
for China, and Diandian, a Tumblr-like blog hosting platform for China,
started by high-profile Internet entrepreneur Jack Xu, notably the former
CIO at XiaoNei (now Renren).
Moreover, the Innovation Works fund has made early investments in 12
startups. Significantly, two of those 12 – Android mobile operating
platform Tapas Mobile and Tumblr-like Diandian –have attracted follow-on
financing from venture firms, among them GSR, Sequoia Capital and Ceyuan
Ventures.
As part of its outreach to budding entrepreneurs in China, Innovation Works
is running a JumpStart program to incubate 10-15 teams for three months. It
’s also brought in three entrepreneurs in residence: Zhou Limin, an ex
chief architect at Baidu to work on Wandoujia; experienced tech entrepreneur
Ryan Xu to join current project Buding, and Ma Jie, a former R&D director
at China’s large software security company Rising, who is starting his own
cloud security project.
What’s hot for China venture and startups? Android – and yes, more clones
of western Internet models.
Several of the new investments from Innovation Works are in Android-hinged
startups that are copies: Yingyonghui, a Chinese version of mobile phone app
store GetJar, Wandoujia (or Wonder Pod), a software tool to manage video,
music and e-book downloads; and a location-based service Buding modeled on
Yelp.
Look for DCM’s just-launched $100 million “A-Fund” – with backing from
GREE and KDDI in Japan and China’s Tencent – to spur a lot more investment
in startups that build on the Android ecosystem – much as Kleiner Perkins
’ $200 million iFund spurred development of iPhone apps. What’s driving it
is the growing dominance of the mobile Internet and the potential of Google
’s open technology system for smartphones.
Just days after the A-Fund launch, Keytone and DCM poured $18 million in
Papaya Mobile, a social gaming network on Android. Silicon Dragon had
previously reported on the startup’s earlier $4 million financing in 2010
from DCM – and the startup’s strategic switch from Java to an open Android
platform.
In little more than one year, Papaya Mobile has grown to 10 million users
for its mobile Facebook-like service on Android.
This is the first startup for CEO and co-founder Si Shen, who is only 29
years old and sports university degrees from Tsinghua and Stanford plus
Google on her resume – a sign of the high-caliber entrepreneurial talent
that is increasingly abundant in China’s tech scene.
Watch this space for more of what’s happening: Silicon Dragon Beijing, May
25, at Tsinghua Science Park. We’ll be talking big deals, IPOs and mega
funds with a who’s who of China venture and startups in the busiest – if
not the best – season yet. |
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