Kingsoft Cloud, a China-based cloud storage services provider spun out from office software producer Kingsoft, completed a $300m series D round last week that featured its parent company.
Kingsoft invested $150m to keep its majority stake in Kingsoft Cloud, which has now raised about $500m altogether. Private equity firm Liyue Investment committed $100m to the round and investment group China Minsheng supplied $50m, respectively.
Founded in 2012, Kingsoft Cloud provides cloud computing data storage services to corporate clients, operating data centres in China and North America. It serves around 90% of China’s online game developers and expanded into the internet, online video and government administration sectors in 2015. Kingsoft Cloud currently boasts the third largest market share of China’s cloud computing services market, according to market research firm IDC.
Cloud computing technology is hardly a novelty now, so emerging enterprises in this space have been able to raise a significant number of corporate-backed rounds. Historically, such investments went up significantly from 62 deals in 2013, estimated at over $2.29bn to 116 rounds, worth a total of $11.64bn in 2015. They seem to have dipped in 2016, which featured 101 rounds worth a total of $6.1bn, and the trend seems to be ongoing in 2017 at the time of writing.
