China Q&A platform Zhihu raises $55m
Tencent Holdings has led a $55 million Series C round of funding for Zhihu, a Chinese question-and-answer platform similar to US-based Quora.
New investors also include Chinese search engine Sougou, a subsidiary of web portal Sohu. Existing investors SAIF Partners, Qiming Venture Partners and Innovation Works all participated. The round values Zhihu at more than $300 million, Yuan Zhou, founder and CEO of the company, said on the Zhihu platform.
"We believe Pony Ma [Tencent's founder] and Xiaochuan Wang [Sougou's CEO] have a deep understanding of our product and they have shown sincerity in cooperation. Both of them are good investors in terms of their strength on the business. We will work together on future product development," Zhou said.
Zhihu was founded in January 2010, a little more than a year after Quora's launch in late 2009. It shares a numbers of features with its US counterpart, such as online voting, user-generated topics, and options to follow particular topics or users.
In addition to Q&A sessions, the Chinese-language platform also has daily and weekly newsletters and hosts round table activities. The platform currently has 29 million registered users, with monthly page views of about 300 million.
Zhihu received angel funding from Innovation Works in 2011, and then Qiming provided a Series A round of approximately $10 million. Last year, SAIF Partners led a Series B round worth $22 million.
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