Chinese Edtech Unicorn Zuoyebang Adds $1.6 Billion to Its Series E Round- PingWe...

Chinese Edtech Unicorn Zuoyebang Adds $1.6 Billion to Its Series E Round- PingWest

Chinese Edtech Unicorn Zuoyebang Adds $1.6 Billion to Its Series E Round

Wang Boyuan

posted on 18 hours ago

The latest round was backed by existing investors including Tiger Global, SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital China, FountainVest Partners, and Alibaba Group.

Online education is still a sector that was sought after by venture capitals amid the pandemic. Zuoyebang, one of China's biggest online learning platforms, announced Monday that it has finished a $1.6 billion second tranche of Series E.

The latest fundraising was backed by existing investors including Tiger Global, SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital China, FountainVest Partners, and Alibaba Group. In June, the Beijing-based edtech startup has pocketed $750 million Series E led by Fountainvest Partners and Tiger Global.

So far, the five-year-old Zuoyebang has raised over $2.9 billion. According to Crunchbase, the company has been valued at $9.6 billion for fresh financing.

The company claims to have 800 million registered users, of which 12 million are paid members—also, a record-breaking 2.2 million users registered for the 2020 fall semester live-streaming courses.

In 2014, Zuoyebang began as a feature of Baidu Zhidao, a Quora-like Q&A site of China's top search engine Baidu. The project spun out the next year to be a Q&A platform targeting school-age users, letting them get answers by taking a picture of their homework.

The funding comes only four days after its biggest domestic rival Yuanfudao announced a $300 million funding, the fourth tranche of its ongoing $3.5 billion Series G this year.

In a report released by Fastdata, China's K12 online education sector has in total raised upwards of $7.6 billion in the year 2020. The cash-burning war only seems to be getting hotter.