The corporate training platform has raised its Series D round of financing worth USD 100 million dollars.
This round of investment was led by Centrurium capital (大钲资本) and followed by YF capital (云锋基金), SIG global (SIG海纳亚洲) and Index capital (指数资本). This round of financing will be mainly used for the construction of content and enhancement of professional service capabilities.
According to ITJUZI up till now, Yunxuetang has completed five rounds of financing with a total amount of around USD 200 million. It is the company that has obtained the largest amount of investment and the highest frequency of investment in the field of domestic enterprise training so far. The firm raised its Series A round of financing from Everest venture capital (朗玛峰创投) back in 2014 worth CNY 80 million, which was followed by a USD 22 million Series B round of financing in 2017 led by SIG global. Then later in the same year, Yunxuetang managed to raise another round worth CNY 70 million. After over a year the YF capital led the firms Series C round by pouring in USD 50 million.
Yunxuetang was established back in 2011 and is positioned as an enterprise university construction and operation service provider, providing enterprise customers with "software+ content + services" integrated solutions. According to Jingmeiti, currently, the company has served thousands of large enterprises and around 30,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. It has nearly 1000 employees, has two headquarters located in Beijing and Suzhou, and has branches in more than 20 major cities such as Shenzhen and Hangzhou.
Although the current global economy is slowing down, the industrial structure is transforming, and the level of corporate profits is continuing to decline, all industries are facing severe survival challenges. Ruize Lu (卢睿泽), the founder of Yunxuetang, said that the continuous improvement of talents needs to be based on continuous learning. As long as there is an organizational form of enterprise, enterprise learning is just a market demand, especially for large and medium-sized enterprises.
In the past few years, with the rise of the Internet, the training industry has gone from offline to online E-learning. However, how to provide high-quality, high-efficiency, low-cost training and meet employees at different levels and with different needs within an enterprise is the ultimate goal of enterprise training.
“Intelligently matching course content for employees at different positions and at different levels has become another trend in the industry after online training. Cloud Academy sees this demand of enterprises. Created a set of future-oriented curriculum production standard system, gathered professional institutions and teachers in different fields, and worked together to create a new curriculum,” said Lu.
From the data provided by Zero2IPO, a total of 5,461 investment cases occurred in China's equity investment market in the first three quarters of 2019, totaling CNY 431 billion, down by 53.7% respectively year-on-year. The financing environment for Chinese startups doesn’t seem to be very optimistic. So why is Yunxuetang favored during this capital winter?
Liu Shaoqiang (刘绍强), executive director of Centurium capital, said “We have been optimistic about the field of enterprise services for a long time, it is a 100 billion market. The cloud-based software + content + service model created by Yunxuetang significantly improves the efficiency and quality of enterprise training. The core team of the firm has been deeply cultivating technology and content for a long time. From the day of its establishment, it has continuously provided high-quality services to enterprise customers and has been widely recognized in the industry. "Investment-driven change" is the big capital investment philosophy that has always been upheld, Cloud School's innovative business model perfectly fit this philosophy. We look forward to this cooperation which can lay a solid foundation for further promoting the healthy development of the corporate training market in the near future."