On February 18, during Zhangmen 1 to 1's annual meeting named "unparalleled", the founder and CEO ZHANG Yi officially announced that the company had already completed the USD 350 million series E-1 financing.
Zhangmen 1 ot 1 team celebrates success of the new round financing. PHOTO: Credit to Zhangmen 1 to 1
Feb 18, 2019 /EqualOcean/ - Zhangmen 1 to 1 held the company's annual meeting named "unparalleled", and during which the founder and CEO ZHANG Yi (张翼) officially announced that Zhangmen 1 to 1 had already completed its series E-1 financing of USD 350 million. This round financing is co-led by CMC (China Media Capital, 华人文化产业基金), CICC Alpha (China International Capital Corporation Alpha, 中金甲子) and CIC International (China Investment Corporation International). Sofina, Genenis Capital (元生资本) and Haitong International (海通国际) followed.
EqualOcean actually had already published the news of Zhangmen 1 to 1's Series E-1 financing on Jan 23, 2019, and the last funding round of Zhangmen 1 to 1 was mentioned to be closed in December 2017 with a financing amount of USD 120 million while being valued at USD 1.2 billion.
This new round financing helps to promote Zhangmen 1 to 1's value of assessment to rise to USD 1.6 billion. ZHANG Yi said that up to now, Zhangmen 1 to 1 takes a nearly 60% of the vertical market and is now one of the online education "unicorns". Regarding this round of financing, ZHANG Yi introduced that its amount is the highest among all the K12 online one-on-one whole-subject tutor related investments.
As to the fund of this round financing, it will be used in two major aspects:
On the one hand, Zhangmen 1 to 1 will continue to deepen its business of K12 online 1 to 1 whole-subject tutoring, and will invest in the technology, teaching, research, and the products as well.
Zhangmen 1 to 1 will enhance its technology to better take advantage of big data and deep learning GPU clusters, in order to constantly upgrading and optimizing its Intelligent Learning System 3.0. The usage of computer vision, voice interaction, natural language understanding, would help to further optimize the learning efficiency of students and accelerate the scale-up development of the company.
In teaching and research, the team with more than 10,000 heads will further expand the depth and breadth, and continuously refine the knowledge points and academic information. With the coverage of teaching and research in more areas of the country, Zhangmen 1 to 1's education products will continue to enter more cities lower than Tier 2 and to bring high-quality education to more children.
On the other hand, with the fund, Zhangmen 1 to 1 will also focus more on education for all-round development, and create an education system in which the subject education and all-around development education could help each other.
At the end of last year, Zhangmen 1 to 1 launched its brand of art education for the 4-14-year-old children, Zhangmen Peilian (掌门陪练), to help them better practice instruments like piano and violin. The brand initiates the idea of "be patient to accompany" and helps children practice instruments and fully stimulate their musical interest. This part of the business would also be helped with intelligent technologies that Zhangmen paid much attention to.