Q&A voice app Fenda announced on Thursday that it has secured its Series A+ round of financing from tech giant Tencent. This financing comes after Fenda secured its Series A financing this June from Sequoia Capital China and Vision Capital.
According to Fenda, the new financing will be used in upgrading product and user experiences, and cultivating web celebs in knowledge-sharing and marketing.
Up until now, Fenda has secured a total of over RMB 200 million (USD 29 million) in financing.
“When we founded this company a year ago, we believed that the age of knowledge-sharing was coming, and that knowledge can also be priced and traded,” said Ji Xiaohua, founder of Fenda. He said that in the future we can expect there will be a large number of web celebs who turn what they know into cash, and distribute their knowledge according to the dynamic needs of the public.
Before establishing Fenda, which in Chinese literally means “one-minute answer”, Ji also founded Guokr.com in 2010 and Zaihang in 2015: while the former is China’s leading online community for science and technology education, the latter offers one-on-one mentoring sessions, with mentors and mentees meeting offline for talks.
“Tencent believes in the potential of knowledge-sharing,” said Xia Yao, the Executive Director at Tencent Investment. “By investing in Fenda, the ecology of Tencent can improve further.”
Fenda now has more than 10 million users. Among these, over one million are paying users, and over 500,000 are experts in their own field who get paid for answering questions.
(Top photo from Pixabay)