Hangzhou-based social photo-sharing platform “in” just received official admission to list on China’s New Third Board.
Growing net loss may be the driving force behind the planned listing. According to Sina Tech, the company reported losses from January to July 2015 of RMB 58.7 million (USD nine million). In June 2015, The company landed RMB 300 million in Series B financing from Matrix Partners China and other earlier investors including Cash Capital and Incapital.
In its report submitted to the authority of the New Third Board, known for small-and medium-sized enterprises financing, the company stated its valuation reached RMB 221 million in July 2015.
Xie Xu, founder and CEO of the app, is a serial entrepreneur. Her online communication community for game developers was acquired by Chinese leading online portal Sohu. She then founded a social shopping platform in 2012, and released this latest photo app in June 2014.
According to Sina Tech, the app currently has 70 million registered users, 90% of whom are female. The company claims more than seven million pictures are uploaded per day. The app’s major client is Internet advertising transaction platform Alimama, owned by Alibaba. Alimama contributed 38% and 88% to the app’s income in 2014 and the first seven months of 2015 respectively, Sina Tech reported.
The photo app’s major rival in China is Beijing-based photo sharing app “nice.” Launched in October 2013, nice raised three rounds of funding in 2014 alone, a total of USD 64 million. Investment was helmed by leading capital firms, VY Capital, Tiger Fund, and Matrix Partners China. According to new mobile O2O media iyiou.com, nice has 30 million registered users and two million pictures shared per day.
Chinese photo apps have to cover a lot of ground to catch up with the global pioneer, Instagram. The San Francisco-based app took a USD 715 million buyout from Facebook in September 2012. Instagram currently has over 300 million registered users who share 60 million photos every day. Users can share their photos almost simultaneously in nearly all existing social networking services (SNS).
Most of China’s Instagram-like “photo + tag” apps are able to manage the “photo” uploading part, but are weak in their social networking performance.
(Top photo from pp.163.com)
