Social media company Sina has exited China-based personalised news app developer Toutiao as part of a $1bn series D round that valued it at $11bn, 36kr reported on Friday.
The round was co-led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and CCB International, a subsidiary of government-controlled financial services firm China Construction Bank. Additional participants were not disclosed.
Founded in 2012, Toutiao operates a mobile app that recommends news stories to users according to their personal preferences. It had 175 million monthly active users as of January 2017 when it acquired US-based video creation app Flipagram.
Sina Weibo invested in Toutiao’s last round, a $100m series C led by Sequoia Capital that closed in 2014 at a $500m valuation. Both Sina and Zhou Hongyi, CEO of cybersecurity company Qihoo 360, sold their stakes in the latest round, scoring big exits in the process.
The company had picked up an undisclosed amount of equity financing in series A and B rounds backed by investors including SIG China, a subsidiary of technology and trading firm Susquehanna International Group, and entrepreneur Yuri Milner.
The Flipagram acquisition was made partly to add another string to Toutiao’s bow but also to give it a foothold in the US as part of an international expansion strategy that has involved entry into Brazil, India, Indonesia and Japan.
In addition to global growth, the series D funding will go to ensuring a high quality of media content is available for the app. Toutiao also intends to strengthen its video capabilities and an online question-and-answer service.
Although it invests more selectively than many of China’s other large internet-focused businesses, Sina has been intermittently active in corporate venturing, having launched a $30m fund in 2010 to help develop an ecosystem around its microblogging platform, Weibo.
Sina has been fairly successful too, scoring an exit not only from Toutiao but from social video platform Tiange, in which it invested $30m in 2010, four years before the company went public in a $208m initial public offering.
Apart from Toutiao, Sina’s most valuable portfolio company is likely Yixia Tech, the owner of short-form video platform Miaopai. Sina’s Weibo subsidiary invested $1.6m at seed stage and either it or Sina led all its subsequent rounds, most recently supplying $120m of a $500m series E round in November 2016 that valued it at $3bn.
Other notable investments include executive and innovation networking service GWC, fashion and beauty product information platform Tuolar and Taboao Movie, the online ticketing spinout of e-commerce firm Alibaba (itself an early investor in Sina), which raised $260m in a series A round in May 2016.
Sina’s invests less often than the likes of Alibaba, Tencent or Baidu but its approach is also more tightly concentrated, focusiing as it does predominantly on media companies.
In other words you could say Sina invests more like a traditional CVC, and while that may not get it the weight of influence enjoyed by some counterparts, it does give added scope for returns. After all, how many corporate venturers have achieved a 22 times return on an investment in under three years?