Jul 8, 2020

Chinese interactive entertainment platform Kuaidian Yuedu has raised almost US$100 million in its Series C round of financing, according to a statement. Led by Sequoia Capital China Fund, the funding round saw participation from venture investment firms GGV Jiyuan Capital and Morningside Capital, in addition to other existing backers, the statement from Blue Lake Capital, a previous investor, said. Beijing-based Kuaidian Yuedu (translated as Quick Reading) is an immersive storytelling app that allows users to narrate short plots through text, audio and video formats, and monetize their content as well. With intellectual property-protected content, the user-generated content platform has created a ‘new creator ecology’, CEO of Kuaidian Zhang Rui said in the statement, driven by smart and interactive scripts. Kuaidian’s official version launched in 2017, positioned as a “conversational fiction platform” focused on storytelling amongst young readers. In the following years, Kuaidian added rich media interaction features, such as dubbing functionalities and full-speech dialogue novels, and piloted video formats through vertical-screen short dramas through text and audio. According to the statement, 20% of the platform’s online community participate in content creation every month, and 50% engage and interact with the content. The platform currently features 30,000 short dramas, consumed by 70% of the platform’s users, with 5 million daily active users in total. Kuaidian has plans to monetize the content platform, through advertising and value-added benefits for members, aiming for a monthly turnover of RMB 10 million (US$1.4 million at current rates). It is planning to release between 20 to 30 original dramas this year, the statement added. It also aims to expand its user base by including more formats such as live broadcasts. “Kuaidian in the past two years has successfully proved that dialogue novels, on the production side, are the content form with the lowest threshold for creation, and continue to accumulate a large amount of valuable [intellectual property],” Zhang said in the statement. “On the consumer side, short video is the media form with the highest user ceiling. Now that Kuaidian has the opportunity to use differentiated content to enter this market, then we must bravely try,” he added. Prior to this fundraise, Kuaidian had previously raised $47.1 million from GGV Capital, Morningside Group, and Blue Lake Capital, according to data from Crunchbase . Over half of this was raised in a venture round in 2019, from GGV Capital.