Tech hiring service Lagou announced today the completion of a 220 million yuan (33.8 million USD) C round led by existing investor Hongdao Capital, followed by Qiming Ventures and Rongchao Investment. This round will raise the company’s total funding to nearly 65 million USD.
Prior to this financing, Lagou raised 2 million yuan in angel investment from Chinese top angel investors Bob Xu and Zeng Liqing, $5 million USD in Series A from Bertelsmann and a $25 million USD B round from Qiming Ventures in 2014.
Lagou was initially launched by Xu Dandan, Ma Delong and Bao Aile in 2013 as a parallel project to 3W Café, a to-go place for budding entrepreneurs and angel investors in Beijing’s tech hub Zhongguancun. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited 3W Café and even drank a coffee there, an anecdote widely circulated in China’s startup community as a government gesture supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.
Lagou is a job-matching platform connecting tech talents and companies to facilitate the recruitment process. The company claims to have registered over 110,000 enterprise customers and 6 million individual users so far.
The company now plans to expand beyond its home-turf in tech hiring. While part of the new funding will be used for R&D, the company is expanding its services into the financial industry and users from this sector now account for more than 15% of their total user base, the firm disclosed.
Based on a back-end payment model, the site allows recruiters to post positions and job seekers to browse jobs free of charge. Payment only applies to employers who have recruited successfully.
After three years of development, the startup launched commercialization plans in the second half of last year, achieving more than 70 million yuan of revenue. This figure is expected to reach 200 million yuan in 2016, the company added.
The market size of China’s online recruitment sector is going to hit 4.61 billion yuan in 2016, an 18.8% growth YOY, according to report by Analysys.
Image credit: Lagou