Baring Asia leads $198m round for Chinese coding start-up

Other investors include CITIC Securities, Goldstone Investment, Youshan Capital, Wens Investment, Sino-Ocean Capital, Greater Bay Area Fund, and BOC International. In addition, several existing backers re-upped, among them Hillhouse Capital, CMB International, Bohai Zhongsheng - another Bank of China-controlled vehicle - and Guangdong Technology Financial Group.

It is the largest funding round for a coding start-up in China. Other activity in this space includes a $50 million Series B round last year for Hetao 101. Huaxing Growth Capital and Hillhouse took the lead.

Coding education has won regulatory support, with Baosheng Chen, China’s minister of education, stressing the importance of courses featuring artificial intelligence in primary and secondary schools. IT is now an optional subject in university entrance examinations in Zhejiang province, while cities like Nanjing and Chongqing have added programming to high-school syllabuses.

Founded in 2015, Codemao has launched a matrix of products targeting children of 4-16 years, covering graphical programming, Python, and other mainstream programming languages. It claims average monthly revenue now exceeds RMB200 million, with 50% of users based in lower-tier cities.

Codemao also provides programming education solutions for schools and offline training institutions. It has cooperated with more than 17,000 establishments, including Tsinghua University, Hong Kong University, the Affiliated High School of Renmin University, and Fudan University. In addition, the company has established more than 600 offline training centers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Codemao launched a recruitment drive, announcing plans for 1,000 new jobs nationwide.

Ziniu Fund provided the company's angel round in 2015 and Gemboom.com contributed RMB20 million in Series A funding the following year. Two more rounds of RMB120 million and RMB300 million, respectively, came in 2017 and 2018. The first of these - described as a Series B - was led by Hillhouse. The second was led by CMB.

A China Everbright-managed fund invested in early 2019 and then the Russia-China Investment Fund led the first tranche of a Series C, worth RMB400 million. A Series C extension of RMB250 million, led by CMB, closed in April.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• China
• Education
• artificial intelligence
• Baring Private Equity Asia
• CITIC Securities
• Hillhouse Capital Management
• BOCI Private Equity
• Sino-Ocean Capital