Tencent Joins Whisper’s New Round of $36M

This is the third round of the mobile anonymous sharing app Whisper and the number is closed at $36M. Meanwhile, the app launched its updates with new features like related posts, enhanced search and categories function which improve the overall exploring experience. Founded in 2012, Whisper has raised a total of $60 million so far.

It seems that the tech giant now is more willing to invest than to get the hands dirty in the foreign market of social networks, probably because of the “social” setbacks it had recently. To some reason the hottest social app in China is not that attractive to the foreign users. Despite the great effort Tencent spent on marketing WeChat overseas, this global campaign didn’t seem to have paid off. Last month, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba invested $215 million in Series D funding of U.S. mobile messaging app Tango. Likewise, Tencent  already acquired 13.84% of Kakao Talk, the South Korean WeChat for US$63M back in 2012. It is also known that Tencent was a covert investor of Snapchat’s last round of $60 million. 

As to the local market, the buzz of anonymous social network is swelling as well, some local similar apps got viral quickly on WeChat (Tencent’s mobile messaging app who had 396 million million active monthly users as of Q1 2014) and more copy-cats surfaced in this space.

Apart from Tencent, Whisper also has Shasta Ventures, Thrive Capital, as well as the existing backers Lightspeed Ventures and Sequoia in this round. Its competitor Secret who recently got more promotion has raised around $11 million from investors including Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.