IoT Industry Unicorn Aqara Secures $156.3 Million in C Round of Financing

Aqara, a unicorn company within the IoT industry, announced on Thursday that it had completed a new round of financing in which it garnered 1 billion yuan ($156.3 million) – one of the largest financing rounds in the industry this year. The investors in this round of financing are Shenzhen Capital Group, Joy Capital, China Telecom, Greenwoods Asset, Zhongyuan Capital and Unicom Unicom CICC. In this round, Yunmu Capital continues to serve as the exclusive financial adviser.

The round was focused on Aqara’s product R&D and innovation, global commercial channels construction and landing, brand building and talent introduction. The company has successively completed six rounds of financing since 2014. After this round of investment, the valuation of Aqara has exceeded $1 billion.

Aqara has the ability to provide intelligent one-stop wireless solutions for the whole house on a large scale, and has the ability to provide 2B IoT software and hardware integrated solutions and 2C intelligent customized solutions for the whole house. Its products and services have been widely applied in home, apartment, hotel, real estate, office, pension and other industries.

Aqara’s products, interconnected with many smart products around the world, support multiple platforms including Mi Home, Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

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Since the launch of its whole house intelligent customization service, there have been more than 600 Aqara Home smart home experience halls in China. The company currently has a team of more than 1,000 people with industry-leading R&D capabilities, including artificial intelligence, big data, App R&D, cloud platform R&D and more, with R&D personnel accounting for over 50%. You Yanjun, the founder of the company, is a scientist in the field of automation and control technology. He participated in the proposal of all important patents of the company and was involved in the filing of 224 patents in total.

According to a data report by Forward Intelligence, the scale of China’s smart home market increased from 260.85 billion yuan ($40.77 billion) to 514.47 billion yuan ($80.42 billion) from 2016 to 2020, and it is predicted that the scale of China’s smart home market will reach 580.05 billion yuan ($90.67 billion) in 2021. What’s more, as early as the end of 2019, China became the world’s largest consumer of smart home products, accounting for 50%-60% of consumption in the global smart home market. The market penetration rate of the smart home industry continues to show a high growth trend.