China vocational education provider gets $390m Series A
Fenbi, a China-based vocational education platform, has raised $390 million in a Series A round led by IDG Capital and Trustbridge Partners. Hony Capital also took part.
The company has ties to Yuanfudao, China's best-funded online education start-up. When Yong Li, founder and CEO of Yuanfudao, left Netease in 2012, his first project was Fenbi.com. The company received about RMB10 million ($1.6 million) in Series A funding from IDG in 2012 and a $7 million Series B from Matrix and IDG in 2013.
However, Li then turned his attentions to Yuantiku, which offers customized practice tests for high school and college entrance examinations. Yuantiku ultimately became Yuanfudao, a large-class K-12 teaching platform. In 2014, Fenbi.com was renamed Yuantiku. A year later, the business was spun out.
Fenbi claims to be China’s first online vocational training platform. It covers exam preparation for the likes of civil servants, teachers, and employees of other public institutions. It also focuses on postgraduate entrance exams.
As of January, the company had 48 million users, of which seven million were paying users. They have completed 900 million practice sessions on the site. A spike in demand during COVID-19 saw revenue exceed RMB4 billion in 2020.
Fenbi is also pursuing offline expansion. It has 396 learning centers across 31 provinces, up from 30 facilities in 2019. Last year, the company recruited 12,000 employees, taking overall headcount to 14,000. Three-quarters of these are teaching staff.
The new capital will go towards teacher recruitment and training and the development of new products and learning resources.
“Adult education and lifelong education is a blue ocean market. Technology and business model innovation has just begun to take effect on a large scale. Fenbi is one of few companies with proven capability in merging online and offline functions. It has accelerated offline development after becoming the clear leader online,” said Yi Cheng, a managing director at Hony, in a statement.
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