Chinese IT Education Startup Jike Xueyuan Pockets Series B Financing

Jike Xueyuan (geeks college in Chinese), an online education platform for Chinese IT talents, announced it has secured US$22 million of Series B funding from SIG and Series A investor BlueRun Ventures.

Jike Xueyuan is an online education portal which teaches IT related career skills with all the course contents being generated by an in-house development team. Jike Xueyuan now offers more than 300 online video courses covering Android, iOS, HTML5, Cocos2d-X, Java, among others. Launched at the beginning of this year, the service now claimed more than 120,000 registered users.

Jike Xueyuan is also known for its quick response in offering courses on popular contents in software development industry. It is the first Chinese online education platform that provides courses on Flappy Bird, 2048, Swift, etc.

The company offers services to both individual and enterprise clients. It sells membership to individual users at 30 yuan (US$4.89) per month or 260 yuan per year. For cooperation with enterprises, the startup either provides online training program to the clients’ employees or help the companies to recruit suitable talents.

With the investment, the firm planned to expand the content team, as well as to recruit algorithm and data analysis talents. It also has plans to expand to more web development technologies like PHP.

The company’s CEO Jin Yan is the founder of one of China’s earliest mobile developer community eoe. He is also the author of a very popular book on Android development.

China has witnessed the boom of online education in the past one-year period. However, the closure of Tizi and Nahao, two online education sites launched by Gong Haiyan, founder of the US-listed online dating service Jiayuan, have triggered widespread concerns about whether online education will be the next “bubble” to pop.

image credit: Jike Xueyuan