阿里巴巴全资收购企业协作软件Teambition – Sina Tech
What happened: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has fully acquired Shanghai-based productivity tool Teambition on Tuesday through its investment arm, according to Chinese enterprise intelligence platform Qichacha.com. Teambition consists of cloud-based project management tools, with functions similar to a mixture of Trello and Dropbox. Users can collaborate on projects and share or edit documents in real time across departments, locations, and business units. It has more than seven million users across 38 industries with clients including Huawei, Xiaomi, TCL, and Ximalaya.
Why it’s important: As one of the earliest productivity tools in the Chinese market, Teambition was founded in 2011, well before tech giants Alibaba and Tencent made their forays into the team collaboration vertical with DingTalk and WeChat Work, respectively. The move falls in line with Alibaba’s strategic shift to enterprise-facing services. Alibaba rival Tencent also backed the software-as-a-service (SAAS) platform in 2016. Teambition founder Qi Junyuan garners lots of media attention as a successful “post-90” entrepreneur, a term used for those born after 1990. The deal follows an earlier acquisition rumor that circulated in November.