An education unit formed by China-based mobile internet platform company NetDragon Websoft secured $52.5m in series A funding from investors including media and data company International Data Group (IDG) yesterday.
IDG Capital Partners, IDG’s China-based corporate venturing affiliate, invested alongside animation studio Alpha Animation and Vertex Venture Holdings, a subsidiary of Singaporean state-backed investment fund Temasek.
The subsidiary is building an online learning platform that will incorporate mobile internet technology, gamification and user behaviour analysis. The round valued the unit at $477.5m, and NetDragon will use the funding to accelerate development of the platform.
Dongliang Lin, partner at IDG Capital Partners, said: “We believe NetDragon is at the forefront of this field with its holistic ecosystem approach to address the deeply-rooted fundamental issues in our education system, and we are confident that the era of mass-scale personalised mobile learning will arrive with the efforts of the NetDragon team.”
IDG Capital previously invested in NetDragon, which began life as an online game developer, prior to the company going public in Hong Kong in 2007.