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Key trends we observed 📊
A total of 85 investments were made during the week of 18 to 25 October; a slight jump from the prior week’s 60 deals. New industry takes the lead with 14 investments (16.5%), beating enterprise services and healthcare. Breaking down the deal activity by stage, there was an influx of strategic investments, accounting for 34.1% of all transactions, or 29 deals closed.
Top Stories: VCs and Investments 📖📚
China’s first edutech unicorn, Yuanfudao, received the week’s largest investment, successfully raising USD 1 billion for its G2 round, led by DST Global. Yuanfudao has raked in close to USD 3.2 billion alone this year, across three rounds of financing. Yuanfudao is now valued at USD 15.5 billion, roughly five-fold its 2018 valuation of USD 3 billion.
Going public — Top IPOs of the week 📈📉
Yatsen Holding Ltd
Estimated valuation: USD 4 billion
IPO filed on 30 October
Chinese beauty unicorn and Perfect Diary parent company Yatsen filed for U.S. IPO to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 30 October. This heralds Yatsen as the first Chinese beauty company to list on the New York Stock Exchange. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and China International Capital Corporation served as co-underwriters.
Founded in 2016, with the cosmetic sub-brands including Perfect Diary, Little Ondine and Abby’s Choice, Yatsen has served 23.5 million DTC customers in the first three quarters of 2020, exceeding the total number of customers in 2019. In terms of financial data, the net income of Yatsen in 2019 was ￥3.03 billion, a more than three-fold increase compared to 2018’s RMB 635 million.
Startups on our watchlist 📢
Enterprise services
Tenxcloud (时速云): Founded in 2014, raised series C1
Tenxcloud is a container cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider focused on cloud native technology; providing customers with cloud storage, integrated software development and IT operations, microservices platform and other product services. This round was led by Beijing Huatai New Industry Investment Fund; final amount has yet to be disclosed.
CEO Huang Qigong said that this round of financing will mainly be used to increase investment in product R&D, market positioning, recruitment and build strategic cooperation with other companies.
Jing Data (鲸准): Founded in 2016, raised series B
Jing Data is a finance and technology service platform, focused on China’s new economy. It has recently successfully RMB 100 million for its series B funding. This round was jointly led by Lanpu Capital Lanpu Capital and DYEE Capital, followed by strategic investment by Zhangjiang Venture Capital. Jing Data plans to utilise the recent investment to refine its data products, expand its coverage in the financial coverage, and develop its industrial innovation services to serve more regional governments with industrial upgrading needs.