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Japanese, Chinese VCs provide $4.4m round for social site Muzy

  • Andrew Woodman
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The Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of Japanese telecoms giant NTT Docomo, Docomo Capital, and Recruit Strategic Partners - the corporate VC arm of Japanese internet company Recruit Holdings - have teamed up with Chinese entrepreneurs to invest $4.4 million in micro-blogging service Muzy.

The round was reportedly led by communication services giant WPP with Xuyang Ren, former VP of corporate development for Baidu, and Jianfeng Lu, former chief technology officer (CTO) of Qihoo 360, investing alongside the Japanese VCs.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Muzy was launched in 2011 by its cofounders, CEO Andrew Chen and CTO Matt Rubens. It allows users to create a blog by posting images to a grid in a fashion similar to existing social network Pinterest. Muzy has over 20 million users and offers more than 50 publishing tools on Android, iOS, and web applications.

The new capital will be used to scale up the engineering team and expand the suite of creative publishing tools for the Muzy platform.

"This investment allows us to build stronger distribution in Asia, with our new partners in Japan and China," said Chen in a statement. "We also look forward to partnering with WPP and its significant clients to develop our advertising model."

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