Temasek, Tencent lead $300m round for China's MiningLamp
MiningLamp Technology, a Chinese big data company, has raised $300 million Series E led by Temasek Holdings and Tencent Holdings. Kuaishou, a local short-video sharing platform backed by Tencent, also took part in the round.
Last year, Tencent led a RMB2 billion ($298 million) Series D round for the company. This followed a RMB1 billion Series C in 2018, which saw Huaxing Capital take the lead. According to AVCJ Research, MiningLamp raised an undisclosed sum in Series A funding from Heaven-Sent Capital in 2015, and a Series B worth RMB200 million in 2016 led by Sequoia Capital China.
Founded in 2014, MiningLamp core competitiveness is data mining - finding connections and generating insights from a huge amount of data. It started out helping e-commerce platforms crackdown on fraud in online advertisement and then expanded into public security, spotting crime patterns, tracking drug dealers, and preventing human trafficking.
This coverage was further expanded into corporate services in cybersecurity, data analysis, and marketing strategy. The company has designed big data-powered systems for the People’s Bank of China, China Bank of Communications, and China Everbright Bank aimed at improving efficiency in risk assessment. It claims its analytics tools used by more than 200 companies in the Fortune 500, ranging from Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola to LVMH and China UnionPay.
The latest funding round will go towards building a middle-end data platform and a front-end marketing intelligence platform, with a view to aiding overall corporate digitalization.
There are dozens of VC-backed start-ups targeting corporate digitization in China. Recent funding rounds include a RMB250 million extended Series C for Udesk, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider focused on customer relationship management (CRM). Xiaoshouyi, another SaaS CRM specialist, closed a $120 million Series E round last year, while Cloudwise, which focuses on broader digitized IT services, recently raised $24 million.
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