Gotye, more commonly known as Qinjia in Chinese, is a Shanghai-based startup that creates intuitive technical solutions for services which want to integrate communication functions. The company told TechNode it raised Series A funding from Intel Capital to the tune of tens of millions of US dollars.
Intel Capital’s investment will help Gotye to leverage the latest cloud communication solutions in the world and to apply its service to smart hardware industry. The company claimed this the largest funding in Chinese cloud communications sector to date.
The Twilio-like service provides mobile communication technical solutions, offering simple API and SDK that allow developers to quickly implement communication services into their applications. The firm aims to commoditize communication services by making them much more accessible to developers, rather than the time-consuming and talent-intensive necessity of developing one’s own tools from scratch.
Gotye now has three product lines, offering much the same communication features of current IM tools like WeChat. For cloud-based IM services, the startup offers in-app private chat, group chat, and chat room functions for users. Its voice chat solutions allow multi-party voice communication with intercom mode applicable in 2G networks and real-time voice mode available to 3G users. The mobile customer service plug-in solves the problem of communication between users and developers. Communication requests can be initiated within the app, via email, phone calls, or WeChat.
Gotye supports Android, iOS, and WP8 and is adaptable to all mainstream game engines such as native Java, Cocos2d, Unity3d, Air2, and so on.
Software package size is of course one of the biggest concerns developers have. Xu Zezhong, founder of the company, has said that software packages embedding Gotye SDK would generally increase by 700KB to 800 KB, while their API would rise by around 100KB to 200 KB.
At present, Gotye has opened up around 30 APIs, claiming 9,158 registered developers. Altogether 308 apps are now using its service and 765 apps have integrated it, according to the company.
Gotye was founded by Xu Zezhong, a telecoms industry veteran, in 2011. Currently, the service is mostly adopted by games for in-app communication, cooperating with top-tier Chinese game developers of CMGE, Youzu, Chukong, Changyou, among others. They are currently attempting to expand to further sectors like online education, online healthcare and smart devices.
image credit: Gotye