Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi announced today that the company has completed a US$ 216 million Series C round of financing last week, the new funding valued the company at US$ 4 billion. Investors were not disclosed due to non-disclosure agreement.
Xiaomi Funding Records
Series A late 2010 $41M MorningSide, Qiming Ventures, IDG
Series B Dec 2011 $90M Qiming, IDG, Qualcomm, MorningSide, Temasek
Series C June 2012 $216M Undisclosed investors
As we noted before that Xiaomi phone which was characterized by its low price tag and strong tech spec has gained traction among consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities where people might not familiar with iPhone but they certainly heard of Xiaomi through word-of-mouth recommendation.
Lei Jun once revealed that the company has sold more than 3 million Xiaomi phones since it was made available on market last Oct. Not sure how much credit we could give to that though.
In addition to Xiaomi, the past months have seen many Chinese Internet companies tapping into the trend of “making my own phone”, I’m talking about Baidu, Qihoo, Shanda and Alibaba.
The Android powered smartphone which comes in Toshiba or Sharp 4 inches screen, Qualcomm 1.5G Duo-core CPU, Samsung RAM, 800M camera is targeting 5 million shipments by the end of this year, according to Lei.