Chinese collaboration software provider Lanhu raises $157m
Chinese collaboration software company Lanhu has raised RMB1 billion ($157 million) in an extended Series C round led by GGV Capital, reaching a valuation of $1 billion.
Existing investor Sequoia Capital China re-upped. Lightspeed China Partners, GSR Ventures are also among the company’s investors.
Founded in 2017, Lanhu provides cloud-based collaborative tools that focus on workflows related to launching new digital products. It enables collaboration between product managers, R&D engineers, test engineers, and maintenance engineers.
The Series C proceeds will be used to invest in existing products and incubate new product pipelines, as well as build the online community and ecosystem.
Lanhu claims 98% of Chinese internet companies use its technology. CEO Yanghui Ren said the plan is to serve 80% of China’s design teams and products by 2025 and to serve 50% of design teams globally by 2030.
“Lanhu is China’s largest cloud-native collaborative platform for digital products. It has become one of the few SaaS [software-as-a-service] companies that have followed the product-led growth model. It has great sales efficiency and retention rate,” said Jixun Fu, a managing partner at GGV.
Leading players in collaboration software include general-purpose business communication platforms such as Alibaba Group’s DingTalk, ByteDance’s Lark, and Salesforce’s Slack. In the collaboration tools for digital products niche, the benchmark is Australia’s Atlassian, which went public on NASDAQ in 2015 and now has a market capitalization of $98 billion.
In China, similar operators include Ones, which focuses on software developers working on complicated projects and recently raised a $50 million Series C. This is in contrast to Lanhu, which focuses more on collaboration between project managers and software developers, according to an investor.
MM Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for Lanhu’s Series C.
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