Legend leads $37.5m round for China’s ALO7

Other new investors in the round include Guohe Capital and UG Investment, while existing backers Qualcomm Ventures, New Oriental Education & Technology and Vickers Venture Partners re-upped. The new capital will be used to hire technical engineers and upgrade products and services.

Formerly known as Saybot, ALO7 was founded in the US in 2004 by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus Pengkai Pan and his mentor Nicholas Negroponte. In 2010, the company rebranded as ALO7, with a focus on developing English learning products for Chinese students aged 3-15 years. Its materials include textbooks, digital software, and online tutorials offered by foreign teachers.

ALO7 claims that its products are used by more than 4,000 private sector English language-training establishments and 15 million students in 100 cities across China.

“ALO7 has done a great job in developing curricula, creating a wealth of content, constructing an integrated framework, and managing their business processes,” Jiaqing Li, a managing director at Legend Capital, said in a statement. “We strongly support and recognize the importance of ‘dual teaching’ because the expansion and promotion of the teacher's ability itself are also very helpful in solving the problem of inadequate and uneven distribution of educational resources.”

According to AVCJ Research, Dragonvest Partners and Index Ventures invested $1.65 million AL07 in 2005, followed by an $8.2 million round from CMHJ Partners, CID Group and Vickers in 2007. Six years later, Qualcomm, UMC Capital, and Vickers provided Series C funding.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Consumer
• Expansion
• Technology
• China
• TMT
• Education
• Qualcomm Ventures
• Legend Capital
• Growth capital
• Vickers Venture Partners