Crowdfunding platform Kaistart received USD 29 M for Series C
Kaistart
Founder: Xu Jianjun
Founded in: 2015
Financing status: RMB 190 million (USD 29 million) for Series C financing in 2017
Crowdfunding platform, Kaistart, received USD 29 M for Series C on August 30 to boost its operational efficiency.
Crowdfunding became popular a few years ago as a way to help businesses, organizations, and individuals raise funds from the public, but individuals can also invest small amounts of money through crowdfunding. For example, hotel owners can launch a crowdfunding project to acquire customers’ financial support in exchange for a free stay or possibly even dividend income, depending on the amount invested. While crowdfunding initiators always have trouble making their projects more visible, crowdfunding platforms are trying to make the investment process more believable, and attract more interesting projects.
Kaistart is a crowdfunding platform that mainly helps micro enterprises and individuals raise funding. Currently, its platform mainly supports several consumption sectors, including hotels, restaurants, and tourism, among others. Meanwhile, it also provides these micro enterprises and individuals with related enterprise services, such as marketing and branding expansion, employee training, and operational support. Hotel projects, for example, can raise money on their crowdfunding platform. Meanwhile, Kaistart can help hotel projects find a suitable location, recruit staff, and attract customers. Hotel projects can attract investors with coupons, discounts, free stays, and so on.
Founded in 2015 in Hangzhou, it has over 20 million cumulative registered users, 500,000 of whom have joined crowdfunding or consumed. So far, more than RMB 3 billion has been poured into its crowdfunding platform.
This new financing round was led by Yunfeng Capital, with Certain Capital participating as investors. The capital will be used to improve its operational efficiency, as well as introduce new products and services to its platform in order to increase revenue.
Insurance platform Shuidihuzhu received USD 24 M for Series A
Shuidihuzhu
Founder: Shen Peng
Founded in: 2016
Financing status: RMB 160 million (USD 24 million) for Series A financing in 2017
Insurance platform, Shuidihuzhu, received USD 24 M for Series A on August 30 to expand its team.
Shuidihuzhu is an insurance platform that helps patients raise money for serious diseases that require high medical fees, especially those with critical illnesses. It organizes groups of people to prevent cancer and accident risks, and provides users with preferential treatment for low threshold and high cost performance. It requires all of its members to pay RMB 9 at the start of their registration to fuel a pool of funds. When a user is diagnosed with a serious disease like cancer or has an accident, the platform will use the money from its pool or crowdfund the medical fees from all of its users.
Founded in 2016 in Beijing, it claims to have more than one million users in China. So far it has helped 105 patients to deal with serious medical diseases with RMB 12 M. Founder Shen Peng was previously the co-founder of food delivery app, Meituan Waimai.
It previously secured its angel financing round from Tencent, Meituan-Dianping, IDG, Banyan Capital, and Zhen Fund. This new financing round was led by Tencent and Bluerun Ventures, with Sinovation Ventures and all of its existing investors participating. The capital will be used to expand its team, as well as optimize its insurance products.
(Top photo from 699pic.com)
