China shopping search portal B5M raises $16m round

The round also included Oak Investment Partners, the lead investor from an earlier $7.1 million Series A round, as well as existing investors and several new angel investors.

Shanghai-based B5M, which has now raised a total of $23.1 million to date, launched in December 2011. It claims to be a leading independent shopping search portal with 3 million unique visitors and 50 million page views per day via its website and its PC and mobile applications.

The company - whose name means "help me buy" - also claims to send 30 million Chinese consumers each month to around 6,000 e-commerce sites. Its partners include Chinese websites such as Sohu, Kaixin, Yoka, OnlyLady, JingDong, Amazon China, Dangdang.

"With its independent and unbiased search user experience across multiple vertical categories, B5M is well-poised to become the biggest online shopping search portal in China," said William Chen, founding managing partner of ClearVue, in a statement.

Chen will join B5M's board of directors.

"The current growth of B5M reminds me of Kayak in its early days," added Ifty Ahmed, a general partner at Oak Investment Partners. "I believe that it has the potential to achieve a similar outcome in China and become the search portal of choice for Chinese consumers,"

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Consumer
• Technology
• China
• Consumer
• Technology
• Oak Investment Partners