Sanjieke raises CNY 130 million as more and more policies encourage vocational education.
Beijing based vocational education start-up Sanjieke (三节课) announced today that the company has completed CNY 130 million series B round of financing, led by WU Capital (双湖资本).
Prior to this, Sanjieke disclosed a total of 5 rounds of funding. In March 2018 the startup received tens of millions of yuan in its series A round of financing. The leading investment party for this investment was IDG Capital, and Will Hunting Capital (唯猎资本).
The fresh fund will mainly be used as follows:
• Continue to develop new business and new technology courses on the Internet, and open eight colleges in 2020.
• Cooperate with internet companies such as BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) and TMD (Toutiao, Meituan, and Didi Chuxing) to build core talent evaluation standards with enterprises, and improve the application of competency models and professional ability assessment tools.
• Will launch the Alumni association + Employment office program to help users get higher quality jobs.
• Improve its RAC (recognize, analyze, create) learning engine, teaching intermediate system capabilities, service quality, and service efficiency.
Since 2019, China's vocational education field has successively issued several major policy programs, including "China Vocational Education Modernization 2035." On 13 February 2019, the Chinese State Council published its “Implementation plan on National Vocational Education Reform” signaling a significantly strengthened focus on vocational education, which was reinforced in early March 2019 by Chinese Premier. In his 2019 Government Work Report, Premier announced the transfer of CNY 100 billion in funding from the unemployment insurance fund into vocational training to support 15 million people to upgrade their skills. The Strong support of such National Policies will certainly increase the sectors, Capital Market.
Established in 2015, Sanjieke is an online education platform which targets IT professionals in China. It was originally positioned as an “online university” providing a structured practical course for product managers and operators in the Internet industry it provides relevant Internet practical courses in the form of online recording classes. In March 2018, the startup expanded the training oriented to scientific and technological innovation. So far, Sanjieke has included six categories to its training: product manager, internet product operators, new media editor, marketing, and data analysis and business management.
HOU Xianhui (后显慧) founder and CEO believes that there are significant differences between new vocational education and traditional vocational education in terms of user needs, curriculum orientation, curriculum categories, teaching concepts & personal training, business models, etc.
The overall market size of vocational education is about CNY 900 billion. Excluding the traditional training based on research, IT training and vocational skills, the new vocational education almost accounts for CNY 340 billion. By 2020 and 2025, new vocational education is expected to grow to a market scale of CNY 100 billion.