Cheetah Mobile’s live streaming platform Live.me receives USD 50M for Series B from Toutiao
Live.me
Founded in: 2016
Financing status: RMB 332 million (USD 50 million) for Series B financing in 2017
Cheetah Mobile’s live streaming platform, Live.me, receives USD 50 million for Series B from Toutiao on November 9 to accelerate the growth of its live video and short video business.
Live.me is Cheetah Mobile’s subsidiary known as a live video streaming platform. Users can create a live video with their mobile phones, share their interesting life experiences through it, and interact with other users. In addition, users can purchase digital “gifts” like emojis for their favorite live creators.
Live.me first launched in 2016 in the U.S. It currently covers more than 50 countries and regions in the world, and has more than 30 million downloads.
Live.me previously raised financing funding from a group of investors that include Matrix Partners China, Evolution Media China, Gobi Partners, IDG Capital, and Welight Capital, as well as Cheetah Mobile. This new financing round was from Toutiao, a leading news aggregator app, which also integrates personalized content and social live streaming on its app.
Meanwhile, Toutiao will also acquire News Republic, Cheetah Mobile’s news aggregator platform, with USD 86.6 million, and form a strategic cooperation agreement with Toutiao to help both sides speed up their development in the global market. Through the acquisition of News Republic, Toutiao will obtain quality content for global expansion, as well as expand overseas markets and provide more diversified content services for global users.
Live.me will use the capital to accelerate the growth of its live video and short video business, as well as support and integrate Toutiao’s live streaming business.
AI startup Malong receives USD 33M for Series B from SoftBank
Malong
Founder: Huang Dingfeng
Founded in: 2014
Financing status: RMB 220 million (USD 33 million) for Series B financing in 2017
AI startup Malong receives USD 33M for Series B from SoftBank to develop the market overseas.
Malong is an AI startup that helps create AI oriented machines that can recognize physical objects such as products just like a person can. Its goal is to allow its enterprise customers to achieve higher efficiency, quality, and safety in transactions. The company invented an AI algorithm which learns directly from the web’s massive noisy data to perform as well as people can on an image and object recognition test.
Founded in 2014 in Shenzhen, its product has been applied in the clothing, fabric, furniture, retail, food, liquor, and copyright pictures industries, among others. Its AI product that has handled billions of queries, petabytes of data, and supported hundreds of enterprises with AI services reaches over 100 million end-users, primarily in China. Moreover, there are over 300 enterprises applying to integrate their AI-oriented machines each month.
This new financing round was led by SoftBank, and marks the first AI startup that SoftBank invested in in China. Previously, the company secured financing funding from Fortune Capital, Greenwoods Invest, and so on. The company plans to use the funds to facilitate the marketing process to acquire more customers, as well as expand overseas for a larger market.
（Top photo from 699pic.com）
