China's Koala Reading raises $20m Series B round
Beijing Xiangyue Education Technology, operator of the Koala Reading platform that assesses the difficulty of Chinese language texts and helps schools create digital libraries, has received $20 million in Series B funding.
GGV Capital and XVC – an early-stage investment firm co-founded by Boyu Hu, formerly of DCM Ventures and Blue Lake Capital – led the round. CMC Capital Partners and Qiming Venture Partners also took part. GGV and Qiming led Koala’s $10 million Series A round in December of last year.
Established in 2016, the company’s core team has backgrounds in data mining, deep learning, applied linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and natural language processing. They have built an algorithm for grading the reading level of a text so that it can be matched to students based on reading ability, facilitating the development of personalized reading content.
The company claims that user numbers have increased nearly 100-fold over the past six months, with approximately one million logins daily and an average usage time of 30 minutes. Wei Zhao, Koala’s founder and CEO, said in a statement that the proceeds of the latest round would go towards upgrading the system – known as the ER Framework – and the aggregation of high-quality content on a larger scale.
More on Greater China
Latest News
Asian GPs slow implementation of ESG policies - survey
Asia-based private equity firms are assigning more dedicated resources to environment, social, and governance (ESG) programmes, but policy changes have slowed in the past 12 months, in part due to concerns raised internally and by LPs, according to a...
Singapore fintech start-up LXA gets $10m seed round
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) has led a USD 10m seed round for Singapore’s LXA, a financial technology start-up launched by a former Asia senior executive at The Blackstone Group.
India's InCred announces $60m round, claims unicorn status
Indian non-bank lender InCred Financial Services said it has received INR 5bn (USD 60m) at a valuation of at least USD 1bn from unnamed investors including “a global private equity fund.”
Insight leads $50m round for Australia's Roller
Insight Partners has led a USD 50m round for Australia’s Roller, a venue management software provider specializing in family fun parks.