China's Data Grand raises $23m Series B round
Data Grand, a Chinese natural language processing (NLP) solution developer, has raised RMB160 million ($23.1 million) in a Series B round of funding led by Chenshan Asset Management, an arm of Chinese venture capital firm China Broadband Capital.
Other participants include Oriza PE Fund Management, Legend Star and Eastern Bell Venture Capital and some existing investors, according to a statement.
Natural language processing is a subfield of computer science concerned with verbal interactions between computers and humans. It focuses on programming computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data, which the machines then use for translation or even writing based on the original material. NLP researchers believe this could massively improve the efficiency of companies' daily operations.
A leading player in this space in China, Data Grand now has more than 100 clients. It has designed six solutions tailored to industries ranging from media to e-commerce, and also offers AI-powered document reviewing and searching service to clients.
The fresh capital will go towards enhancing the company's R&D capability and its core NLP technology, as well as to expand the application of this technology to the fields of finance, legal consultancy, government affairs and military service, said Yunwen Chen, the founder and ceo of the company. Chen previously served as chief data officer at Cloundary Corporation, one of China's largest online community-driven literary platforms, and also worked at Baidu and Tencent as a data algorithm engineer.
Other major players in this segment include Beijing Xiangyue Education Technology, operator of the Koala Reading platform that assesses the difficulty of Chinese language texts and helps schools create digital libraries, which raised $20 million in a Series B round led by GGV Capital and XVC in August. In addition, Yitu Technology, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up that is developing solutions for machine vision, listening and understanding, raised $200 million in Series C-plus funding in June.
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