Chinese personal finance app Wacai secures additional $80m
Hangzhou Wacai Science, a Chinese personal finance management mobile app developer, has raised an additional $80 million in an extended Series B round of funding led by New Horizon Capital.
Ally Bridge Group and GX Capital - alongside existing investors including China Broadband Capital (CBC), CICC Capital, IDG Capital Partners, CDH Investments and Qiming Venture Partners - also participated.
It takes the company's total funding to approximately $160 million since inception, Wacai said in a statement posted on the company's official Weibo microblog.
Set up in 2009, Hangzhou-based Wacai has developed various mobile apps for users to record their daily spending and manage their credit expenditure. It also operates an online platform selling mutual fund products. The company claims to have over 100 million users on its platform.
According to AVCJ Research, Wacai received RMB10 million ($1.6 million) in seed funding from Amoeba Capital in 2012. In 2013, it acquired Shanghai-based financial research firm, Trust Analytics, to expand its financial database after raising approximately $13 million from IDG and CDH. Last September, CBC led a $50 million Series B round for the online finance company. A few months prior to that Qiminig led a $15 million financing round. Wacai will put this most recent round of funding towards R&D, marketing, financial products innovation and big data development.
China's internet finance sector has become popular among financial investors. Last month, the National Council for Social Security Fund (NSSF) participated in a funding round for Alibaba Group's internet finance affiliate - Ant Financial Services - in a deal that was said to value the business at more than $40 million. The unit also launched a RMB1 billion fund to back internet and finance start-ups.
Ping An is also seeking to deepen its exposure to internet financial services. Lujiazui International Financial Asset Exchange (Lufax) - a Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform that Ping An wants to become an "exchange of exchanges" for non-standard financial assets - got RMB3 billion in funding in March. CICC and CDH both participated, with the latter investing through its funds.
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