China’s answer to Palantir, MiningLamp positions itself towards martech.
MiningLamp announced the completion of USD 300 million Series E round of funding led by Tencent and Temasek, followed by Douyin’s competitor Kuaishou. Kuaishou’s participation of the deal unveils one of the firm’s new strategies to march into the marketing technology (martech) field.
Palo Alto-based Palantir that sells to financial institutions, police and militaries, has long been considered as one of the most secretive companies in Silicon Valley. Founded in 2014, MiningLamp followed the path of Palantir and cut its teeth working on China’s public security. Starting from helping police officers to investigate crimes, it has expanded into finance and industrials gradually.
The company founder Wu Minghui founded a data monitoring for advertisers in 2006, a battlefield that Talkingdata, Question mobile, Jiguang big data (JG:NASDAQ) are competing fiercely in the market. MiningLamp has prepared long enough in martech before entering there once again.
In 2019, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, and the firm reached an agreement to launch the country’s new-generation of marketing intelligence platform and MiningLamp launched its customer-centered responding system to support enterprise decisions. In cooperation with Kuaishou, the software will be acting as a marketing brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from various online channels.
While penetrating more industry verticals, the firm is also operating businesses in intelligent hardware maintenance and artificial intelligence sensors to build up a completed ecosystem. Dominant hardware providers in China include Hikvision and Dahua.
The firm operates more like a consultancy instead of software company, as Palantir does, deploying its engineers to client sites. In 2016, MiningLamp delivered around ten programs and confirmed CNY 100 million sales with 50% of that from police orders.
The founder also once claimed the firm pursued high customer value rather than high-frequency product design that a typical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business chases. In the case of highly customized, the company expected a lower ideal gross margin (around 70%-80%) than that of SaaS firm (about 80%-90%).
MiningLamp was selected for our China Industry Internet map 2019 (read more)