Vision Fund leads Series D for China’s Sobot
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 has led a USD 100m Series D round for Sobot, a China-based customer service software provider. Other investors include GL Ventures, Yunqi Partners, and Mirae Asset Financial Group.
Founded in 2014 and positioned as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Sobot's key offering is in-house developed voice recognition technology. It handles 450 million conversations each year and can serve 900,000 customers at the same time. There is also a partnership with WeCom, previously known as WeChatWork, to help enterprises enhance customer services on WeChat.
The company has worked with thousands of enterprise customers across 21 industries, including education, retail, healthcare, and insurance. It claims average compound annual revenue growth since inception of 80%, and retention rates by number of customers and renewed contract size are 80% and 120%, respectively.
ZhenFund and China Growth Capital provided a CNY 10m angel round for Sobot in 2014 and re-upped in a CNY 7.7m round in 2015. Later the same year, IDG Capital led a USD 5m investment with participation from both ZhenFund and China Growth.
A CNY 50m Series B closed in 2017, with Beijing TRS Information Technology taking the lead, and then Yunqi Partners performed the same role in an extended round of CNY 150m in 2018. Since then, Sobot has raised a Series C and a Series C extension, each of CNY 210m. These were led by Yonyou Network Technology and GL Ventures.
The Series D proceeds will be used for R&D, employee training, and service expansion.
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