Shanghai-based Zhonglu Capital invested millions of yuan in Petta, a social networking app for users to share information, pictures, and videos of their pets. Petta will be released on both iOS and Android platforms before the Lunar New Year (report in Chinese).
Lv Bosen, founder of Petta, previously set up Poopur, a pet community acquired by dog lover e-commerce platform Goumin in 2012. Goumin has recently launched Aichongtuan, a group-buying app for pet supply.
Zhonglu Capital is also the angel investor of another leading domestic pet e-commerce platform Boqii, which booked more than 500 million yuan of sales this year.
Lv said that Petta choose to cooperate with the investor of Boqii because they want to capitalize on the huge user base (2 million registered users) of the platform. Similar domestic apps are Smellme and Haogougou, both of which recorded more than 100,000 registered users, but their active users still linger at less than 10,000.
The market size of Chinese pet industry exceeded 40 billion yuan in 2010 and surged at an annual growth rate of 30%.
