Enterprise Software Provider Facishare Announces Series A Funding from IDG

Facishare, an enterprise software provider, today announced Series A funding from IDG Capital Partners, or IDG. Starting as a social performance management platform, the company now is focused on customer relationship management and renamed it fxiaoke. It aims to build a Salesforce-style service for Chinese enterprises.

Founded in December 2011, Facishare now has more than 12 thousand enterprise customers. As we reported earlier that Tencent’s enterprise QQ IM would like to cooperate with Facishare, possibly helping the latter with marketing and sales.

Commenting on the funding, Niu Kuiguang, vice president at IDG, says that they see potential in SaaS such as software for customer relationship management, employee performance management, supply chain, SME-facing mobile solutions, etc. in China in the long run. The reasons that those enterprise-facing services didn’t prevail in China until this time, he concludes, include 1) smartphones are ubiquitous in China now and ‘mobile office’ is in demand, 2) the ‘cloud’ solved the piracy problem, 3) labor costs are rising that enterprises would turn to management software to improve efficiency, 4) people in new business sectors such as e-commerce need and are used to SaaS, and 5) Chinese have become used to social media like Sina Weibo. IDG thinks Facishare came into being just in time.

Facishare is also part of the second batch of the accelerator program organized by the Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group. IDG has been a partner of this program since the first batch which was launched in July 2012.