Posters of famous worldwide entrepreneurs, including former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Robin Li, board chairman and CEO of Baidu.Inc, grace the walls at 3W Coffee. (Photo by Ma Danning/chinadaily.com.cn)
Beijing-based Space 36Kr incubator labels itself as the place to get much-needed startup financing. 36Kr was established in 2011 as a media firm focused on financial news. In April 2014, it opened Space 36Kr incubator.
36Kr has a strict screening system. A panel of five to seven professional investors and IT business insiders choose 10-30 teams to incubate, usually from 1,000 applicants. Once selected, teams can work for free for three months and get entrepreneurship training. At the end of the incubation period, which they call "graduation", a meeting is arranged with top Chinese investors, including IDG, Sequoia Capital China and Matrix Partners China.
Out of the 42 teams to have "graduated", 40 have received seed funding, 300 million yuan in total, or 7.5 million per team. Six got two rounds of investments. Among the two that did not secure investment, one was acquired while the other achieved self-financing.
"More than half of the 42 projects are launched by people who have quit big companies such as Alibaba, Tencent Holdings Ltd., Baidu Inc., Facebook and Google,"said Zheng Wangyu, a Space 36Kr manager and member of the "screening" team.
Liu Junyan, or Jervis Liu, founder of Easemob, graduated last August, before receiving two rounds of investments amounting to nearly $7 million. The core members of his team, including himself, are four senior engineers who resigned from Nokia, Polycom and Redhat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions.
They designed a tool that adds instant messaging to apps and enables apps to have built-in customer service. It was hailed by app developers who said that with it they can easily make apps social without programming a social networking function from scratch. A year after it was launched, 23,000 companies have used the tool in various kinds of apps, ranging from telecommunications, e-commerce, to financing.
"According to our information, this is the first product of its type in the world," said Tang Huan, public relations chief of Easymob.
Zhang Mo, a programmer who once worked with Microsoft Research and IBM, graduated from 36Kr too. She designed dress-plus.com, a website that uses advanced image recognition and deep-learning techniques. Users can take a picture of a dress or upload an image, and the website finds similar dresses from a growing database covering more than 150 online marketplace, including Amazon, Tmall, Farfetch and Heels.
"Being professional, the elites are more likely to survive fierce competition, and build something that has huge impact," said Zheng.
On March, 36Kr launched an online platform that connects startup companies and angel investors across the country. So far, more than 300 qualified investors and 22,000 startup companies have subscribed and 50 investments totaling 200 million yuan have been made.
Now, 36kr is planning to raise capital in new ways to fuel burgeoning IT innovation. Its new online equity crowd funding platform Next allows people with either 300,000 yuan annual salary or one million yuan in financial deposits, to invest in start-up companies.
"Some fast-expanding startups offer original shares, which effectively ensure low risk and high return to buyers. The platform is where ideas meet capital, and crowd funding for business starters is the trend, " said Liu Chengcheng, 36Kr CEO.
