According to a report on China's education and training industry (for 2019-2020, released in 2021) China's vocational education and training market reached CNY 268.9 billion in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 13.3%.
The news was announced by Fang Yechang, the founder and CEO of the firm, in an internal letter to all the staff. The letter mentioned that Kaike is undergoing a dual upgrade of its business and brand. The upgraded version is positioned in online vocational education and will devote itself to more diversified vocational education and talent services to help users achieve sustainable growth.
The valuation of the education provider has been greatly improved compared with last year and it has consolidated its position as a unicorn in the field of online vocational education. The successful financing also reflects the confidence of the capital market in the online vocational education track to a certain extent.
According to internal information, the size of the team has increased from about 1000 to more than 3500 in the past year and the revenue in the first half of this year has increased by about 3.5 times compared with the same period last year. After the completion of the B1 round, the subsequent B2 round will also be completed in the next two months. These funds will be mainly invested in teaching and research, product technology development, offline scene construction, etc.
At present, the vocational education track is witnessing a frequent emergence of upstarts. Other than that, not only are traditional Internet companies such as Tencent, NetEase and ByteDance setting up in the field one after another, but also education giants such as Gaotu Online have recently begun to transform towards vocational education. It is also worth noticing that, according to relevant data, from January to May 2021, the vocational education field received a total investment of CNY 4.29 billion.