Find out what moves China tech with us. We round up what you need to know about the local venture scene every Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m. (GMT +8), covering major investment stories, MNC partnerships, noteworthy startups, industries with the most investments for the week, and more.
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Top Investment Story
City Cloud Technology (城云科技)
City Cloud, a smart city solutions provider, completed a Series D financing round worth RMB 1 billion (USD 154.4 million) involving Chinese state-owned funds, including Guangzhou Yuexiu Industry Investment Fund and Hangzhou Hi-tech Venture Capital.
The company’s services can be applied in urban management, public security, parking, emergency safety, and transportation to improve traffic congestion in cities. For example, City Cloud cooperates with blockchain company Hyperchain to enable data sharing between departments without compromising security in places like Hangzhou.
To date, City Cloud has more than 1,000 customers, including notable companies like Alibaba Cloud, China Telecom, NetEase, and Dahua.
Startups on Our Watchlist
IBTool (予信科技)
Established in 2017, IBTool is committed to automating the financial industry, where complex business rules lead to tedious tasks that are arduous and time-consuming. The foundation of IBTool’s business is the digitization of working files and documents. After employees scan the documents, IBTool’s digital system uses optical character recognition to capture the text information from an image with a 99% accuracy rate.
Additionally, IBTool’s system enables more complex financial automation. By writing complex financial business rules into code, IBTool launched its own due diligence system, which can analyze documents, identify investment risks, and issue early warnings to project leaders. IBTool can also automatically generate financial documents, using 54,000 industry rules to create and analyze relevant knowledge graphs.
IBTool recently raised eight digits in yuan (more than USD 1.5 million) in its Series A round led by Plum Ventures.
KrASIA News Picks
China’s cyberspace watchdog shakes US capital markets
Major companies have been caught in a dragnet as Chinese authorities look to rein in the mining of its citizens’ data. The most recent high-profile case being a security probe into Didi’s USD 4.4 billion mega IPO. Three other firms, including US-listed Boss Zhipin, Yunmanman, and Huochebang—the latter two of which merged to form Full Truck Alliance, a company whose IPO we shared about recently—were also dragged into a similar situation.
Behind these moves is the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC. One of our editors, Simone, unmasks China’s cyberspace watchdog and what we should expect from this newly dominant agency.