China Mobile fund leads $100m round for job site Liepin

The China Mobile Innovative Business Fund was joined in the round by Matrix Partners China, Huatai New Industry Fund and vehicles managed by Tianhong Asset Management, China Cinda Asset Management, Beijing New Century Fund Management, and Shenzhen Qianhe Capital Management. There were also other unnamed financial and strategic investors.

Liepin, which received a $70 million Series C round led by Warburg Pincus in April 2014, is now said to be worth $1 billion. Matrix also featured in the Series C funding and also committed undisclosed sums to the company in the two rounds before that, which closed in 2011 and 2013.

Kebing Dai, Liepin's CEO, told local media the new funding amounts to recognition that the company is able to withstand the challenges presented by a cooling investment environment. He added that the capital will go towards product improvements, business expansion and branding, and recruitment.

Headquartered in Beijing, the company operates a platform that connects employers, headhunters and job seekers. It was founded in 2006 as Lietou.com, a social media site for professionals similar to LinkedIn. The company switched to the headhunter model two years later. In 2014, it became known as Liepin, partly in response to LinkedIn's entry into the China market.

The company generates revenue from a corporate client base that pays annual membership fees to post jobs and access resumes in the Liepin database. Individual users also pay for certain services. As of June, it had nearly 30 million registered users and 250,000 active headhunters. The company claims to have worked with more than 500,000 corporate clients.

Following the Series C round, Liepin planned to accelerate its online-to-offline (O2O) business strategy, with staff calling up job seekers to update resumes and find out more about their employment expectations so as to better brief corporate clients.

The China Mobile Innovative Business Fund was set up last year. China Mobile and SDIC committed RMB1.5 billion ($225 million) and RMB1 billion, respectively, with a further RMB2.45 billion to be raised from third-party investors.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• Venture
• TMT
• Growth capital
• Matrix Partners
• China