Faraday Future Sells Headquarters After Break with Main Investor Evergrande
Faraday Future has sold its Los Angeles headquarters in a desperate effort to stay afloat after dispute with their former main investor Evergrande.
China’s AI Startup 4Paradigm Raises Over 1 Billion Yuan in Series C Funding
On Dec. 19, 4Paradigm, a Chinese AI technology and service provider, announced it has completed its Series C funding round, raising over one billion yuan ($145 million). The rising star in AI is now valued at around 1.2 billion dollars.
2018 OTEC Winners Awarded RMB 1 Million, with Nobel Prize Winners Attending the Innovation Summit
Overseas Talent Entrepreneurship Conference (OETC), China’s largest international startup business competition came to a close on August 10. A team from Beijing won the global championship while an American and a British team took home the second and third place respectively.
Seeking More than Money: Next Generation Rises in the Internet Era
One year into an ideal job in a multinational corporation, my friend Lin made the seemingly risky decision to move to a startup. The multinational offered a decent salary, bonuses and a mature training system. What more could a new graduate expect?
Kai-Fu Lee: 9 Years of Sinovation Ventures, Parallel Tech Universes, and VC + AI
This year, Sinovation Ventures will turn nine years old. At a recent press conference, I shared several stories of entrepreneurship over the past nine years. During this time, the world has changed dramatically. The venture capital (VC) industry has become increasingly competitive and the rules of the industry have also changed.
Didi’s Challenges
Didi Chuxing is the largest unicorn company in China valued at 50 billion USD. Over the past three years, not only did the company’s valuation grow in double digits, its investors also witnessed the highest rate of return ever of over ten thousand folds. However, despite the rapid expansion growth Didi is experiencing, the company…
A Chinese Startup Argued Alibaba’s Taobao Plagiarized
On September 29, a netizen called Wu Liang released an article titled In Today’s Version of Alibaba Baba and Forty Thieves, Alibaba itself is Forty Thieves on Zhihu, claiming “Alibaba unexpectedly took our technical proposal in the name of the cooperation and completely copied our app.” According to ‘Wu Liang’, the “smart skin quality measurement”（智能测肤）…
Can Jack Ma win the looming war between Alibaba and Amazon?
Can battle-tested and awe-inspiring Amazon and Jeff Bezos beat Alibaba and Jack Ma? A “historical” turning point is seemingly at hand: Alibaba could soon top Amazon in market value. On August 24, by the time the stock market closed, Alibaba’s market value was $445.5 billion, only a limit up away from Amazon’s $455.2 billion. Since…
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun: How Xiaomi Turned the Tables
Recently over 30 council members of the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum (CEF) paid a visit to Xiaomi headquarter. The president of the forum, Chen Dongsheng, chaired this CEO seminar of ours entitled “Internet + Manufacturing Upgrades in China”. At the seminar, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun shared with everyone Xiaomi’s business model, values, difficulties encountered during…
Will unstaffed convenience stores bring about the revival of offline retail stores?
The new business of opening up unstaffed convenience stores was suddenly a hot topic recently. Startup companies flocked to the idea; industrial big names and business giants are also gearing up, eager to take a shot at the business. In December of 2016, following Amazon’s opening of its first self-driving grocery store in Seattle—Amazon Go,…
Southeast Asia becomes Alibaba and Tencent’s new battle field
Two global technological forces are disrupting the peaceful ecological environment in Southeast Asia. They’re not Silicon Valley technological companies like Google or Facebook. They are the two Chinese giants Tencent and Alibaba. The two companies provide the strongest financial support and the most successful business experience for venture capital firms in Southeast Asia. More and…
The Class Divide of Video Streaming in China: Village Cowboys VS. Urban Celebrities
In China, the tech world is rife with rivals. For bike sharing, there’s Mobike and ofo. For ride-hailing, there’s Didi and Uber (and we know how that turned out). And for vlogging and short videos, there’s Miaopai and Kwai. Much like Vine and Twitter, Miaopai shares a close relationship with Sina Weibo and can be…
“Copy to China” Companies that Just Aren’t Fitting In Well
Let’s rewind back to the first 20 years of Internet development in China and talk about its business model. What everyone did back then was “Copy to China”. We essentially brought successful business models from Europe and US to China. For example: Sohu copied Yahoo Tencent copied ICQ Baidu copied Google Taobao copied eBay Meituan…
Chinese shared parking startup Airparking receives millions in RMB of Pre-A Round
Chinese shared parking startup Airparking announced the recent completion of their Pre-Series A round financing worth about millions in RMB. This was an exclusive funding from SAIF Partners and the registration of industrial and commercial changes were done as well. This is the second round of financing for Airparking since their last funding from an…
Silicon Valley’s China Paradox
Li Zhifei has spent his professional career cross-pollinating the world’s two most vibrant innovation ecosystems. Born in central China at the dawn of reform and opening, Li graduated college in China and dove headfirst into the country’s dot com boom of the early 2000s. When that bubble burst, he headed to Johns Hopkins University for…